Top 100 Hemingway's Quotes
#1. He was reading with his mouth open, and he didn't hear me walk across the porch and sit down on the railing opposite his chair.
I kicked his chair with the toe of my shoe. "Stop reading, Mac," I said. "Put down that book. Entertain me." He was reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
J.D. Salinger
#2. [about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises] His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions.
The New York Times
#3. It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.
Arthur Phillips
#4. Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another."
Hemingway's advice to other young writers in "A Moveable Feast.
Ernest Hemingway,
#5. I think Hemingway's [book] titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary.
Sylvia Beach
#6. They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.
Padgett Powell
#7. Universal violence compels the language to be mute ... Silence is not only a metaphor of Hemingway's work; it is also the source of its formal excellence, its integrity.
Ihab Hassan
#9. Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails.
Lesley M.M. Blume
#10. Hemingway's talent was so outsized, that I feel like I can forgive him a lot of his trespasses to have achieved what he did achieve.
Lesley M.M. Blume
#11. Hemingway's minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn't realize they were supposed to have imagined.
Madison Smartt Bell
#12. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
J.G. Ballard
#13. Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.
Malcolm Cowley
#14. From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
#16. I think my biggest learning experience is that it's okay to be who you are - you don't have to exactly fit the mold of what people think a certain kind of career is. I think that discovery - of really knowing who I am and being okay with that and loving myself - was amazing.
Dree Hemingway
#17. [Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.
John Dos Passos
#18. You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn.
Ernest Hemingway,
#19. You find everything on earth at Harry's."
"Yes, my Colonel. Except, possibly, happiness."
"I'll damn well find happiness, too," the Colonel assured him. "Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let's go and beat this guy up and come back and drink some more beer.
Ernest Hemingway,
#24. Stop that!" Ghost Hemingway ordered. "It's like teaching goddamned cats to walk on their back legs." He sighed. "Standing eggs on end in a dining car." He signed again. "Talking to Scotty Fitzgerald sober.
Dennis Vickers
#25. I always like the bad ones. I know he's a bad one of some sort.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.
Ernest Hemingway,
#27. of Esquire contained an article entitled "On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter," written by the magazine's
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
William S. Burroughs
#29. Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader's experience and a part of his memory.
Ernest Hemingway,
#31. Hemingway had a handy dictum. You want to know if something is morally right? Listen to your stomach. If it sits like broken glass, then it's morally wrong.
Ken Bruen
#32. Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.
Ernest Hemingway,
#34. He's written about all the things he knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. The fictionally correct have all the answers, and that's what's wrong with them. They're artistic technocrats. There's no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it can't be smoothly neutralized by dialing up the right attitude adjustment. Poor old Hemingway. If only he'd known.
Walter Kirn
#36. I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes you don't know it's happening.
Mariel Hemingway
#37. You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
T.C. Boyle
#38. The fish's eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession.
Ernest Hemingway,
#39. Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. For me, first, it's finding quiet in my life - and I do that through yoga and meditation. It's also been a matter of changing the way I eat, because I think what we eat can inform who we are; food is a chemical and a drug to a certain extent.
Mariel Hemingway
#41. If you're an addict, if you drink and you're putting a depressant into your body, it's going to cause serious problems.
Mariel Hemingway
#43. I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.
Regina Spektor
#44. Hemingway is a baby when he turns up in Paris, but he's an ambitious baby. And he has the talent. And he's there to stage his breakthrough. So many of the expats who were there at that time were there to do precisely that. It was an ambition-fueled town.
Lesley M.M. Blume
#45. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.
Ernest Hemingway,
#47. Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
Ernest Hemingway,
#48. I didn't want to kiss you good-bye - that was the trouble - I wanted to kiss you good night - and there's a lot of difference. - ERNEST HEMINGWAY Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story. - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Robyn Schneider
#49. Yes," said Wilson. "There's that. Doesn't do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.
Debbie Macomber
#51. There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide.
Ernest Hemingway,
#52. ...The coarse rhetoric and reduction of women to violently empty reproductive organs isn't a great way to argue against Trump's vulgarity. The unhinged rhetoric, violent anti-speech street protests,and hysteria currently on display don't make Trump look like he's a unique threat.
Mollie Hemingway
#53. THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT'S painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts.
Ernest Hemingway,
#55. A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.
Alfred Kazin
#56. I don't know," I said. "There isn't always an explanation for everything."
"Oh, isn't there? I was brought up to think there was."
"That's awfully nice.
Ernest Hemingway,
#57. If I were related to Monet, I don't know if I would be comfortable becoming an artist because it's too much, the comparison. If I wrote a book and put it out, the comparison to my great-grandfather, the comparison would be hilarious. Every critic, it would be their dream, they'd tear me apart.
Dree Hemingway
#58. She's vicious,' Miss Stein said. 'She's truly vicious, so she can never be happy except with new people. She corrupts people.
Ernest Hemingway,
#59. Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
Ernest Hemingway,
#60. It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends.
Stephen Fry
#61. Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
Ernest Hemingway,
#62. A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
Ernest Hemingway,
#64. His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
Ernest Hemingway,
#65. In a war we must all be careful not to hurt each other's feelings.
Ernest Hemingway,
#66. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
Ernest Hemingway,
#67. You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.
Ernest Hemingway,
#68. Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
Ernest Hemingway,
#69. There's no doctor in a white coat that's going to save you, or a system or a pill - it's always going to be you and the choices that you make.
Mariel Hemingway
#70. The old man's head was clear and good now and he was full of resolution but he had little hope. It was too good to last, he thought. He took one look at the great fish as he watched the shark close in.
Ernest Hemingway,
#71. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
E.L. Doctorow
#72. The war seemed as far away as the football games of someone else's college.
Ernest Hemingway,
#73. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#74. I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
Ernest Hemingway,
#75. Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear. It is only missing it that's bad. Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.
Ernest Hemingway,
#76. No; that doesn't interest me.'
'That's because you never read a book about it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#77. There's nothing beautiful about somebody killing themselves.
Mariel Hemingway
#78. Wipe the pap of your mother's breast off thy lips and give me a hatful of that dirt,' the man with his chin on the ground said. 'No one of us will see the sun go down this night.
Ernest Hemingway,
#79. That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
Ernest Hemingway,
#80. If I do it you won't ever worry?'
'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.'
Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.
Ernest Hemingway,
#81. Do you suppose it will always go on?"
"No."
"What's to stop it?"
It will crack somewhere.
Ernest Hemingway,
#82. There isn't any need to deny everything there's been just because you are going to lose it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#83. Maybe ... you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.
Ernest Hemingway,
#84. I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.'
John Krasinski
#85. Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.
Ernest Hemingway,
#86. I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense, but just enough to be careless.
"For God's sake," I said, "yes, don't you?"
"Oh, how charmingly you get angry," he said. "I wish I had that faculty.
Ernest Hemingway,
#87. Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.
Ernest Hemingway,
#88. Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.
Ernest Hemingway,
#89. [Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
Ernest Hemingway,
#90. Jesus gave me this book when he was done with it, saying, "You have got to read this shit, Kevin. It's fucking fantastic." Jesus is terrible with names. - ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Jenny Lawson
#91. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
Ernest Hemingway,
#92. Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.
Sergei Dovlatov
#94. All right, said Nick. Let's get drunk.
All right, Bill said. Let's get really drunk.
Ernest Hemingway,
#95. But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.
Ernest Hemingway,
#96. You wouldn't believe it. It's like a wonderful nightmare."
"Sure," I said. "I'd believe anything. Including nightmares."
"What's the matter? Feel low?"
"Low as hell.
Ernest Hemingway,
#97. A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#98. A fragrance that matches the personality of the man or woman who wears it is an integral part of the memory that you have of him or her. It goes without saying that it's a formidable weapon of seduction.
Dree Hemingway
#99. I've suffered from pretty dark depressing times, and it's probably - not probably - it is the reason why I chose to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Mariel Hemingway
#100. It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
Ernest Hemingway,
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