Ernest Hemingway quotes

“Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

— Ernest Hemingway

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Courage is grace under pressure.”

— Ernest Hemingway