Top 100 Quotes About Hemingway
#1. And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?
Paula McLain
#2. The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face.
'What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?'
'There are ladies present.
Raymond Chandler
#3. But even now, a full century after he wrote his first school poem, scratched out in startlingly plain words on onion skin paper with a number two pencil, his heart and soul remain as fresh and brave as ever. Hemingway lives.
Clancy Sigal
#5. 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
#6. He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.
A. E. Hotchner
#7. Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
Francine Prose
#8. 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
#9. If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
William Faulkner
#10. I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Joyce Carol Oates
#11. Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.
David Guterson
#12. Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.
Joan Didion
#13. Hemingway reached over and took Elsie's hand. "Do you know Dylan Thomas? I have always admired his take on death. Like he, I intend to go raging against the dying of the light." "Dear,
Homer Hickam
#14. One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.
Alessandra Stanley
#15. Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.
Stephen King
#17. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. And so it was literature that brought.
Paul Kalanithi
#18. As Ernest Hemingway wrote, 'Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead ... '
Christopher Flynn
#19. Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.
Charles Bukowski
#20. 'The Sun Also Rises' by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it.
Elizabeth Olsen
#21. As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.
Joe R. Lansdale
#22. This is Teenage madness.
Trapped in a room knowing there's more outside.
Trapped listening to a teacher talk about Hemingway as if each sentence and word had mythical importance.
Trapped knowing she is in the room with me.
Travis Thrasher
#23. Hemingway has his classic moment in "The Sun Also Rises" when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#24. Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know.
Rod Serling
#25. As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare.
William Deresiewicz
#27. Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage.
Jessica Knoll
#28. Hemingway, whenever he was stuck in his writing, would tell himself to write one true thing. A true sentence. Then, he would write another. And another. It
Kamal Ravikant
#29. Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still ... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.
Mickey Spillane
#30. Start over again. Concentrate." [to a young Ernest Hemingway]
Gertrude Stein
#31. There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.
George Packer
#32. Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails.
Lesley M.M. Blume
#33. I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.
Jim Harrison
#34. English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#35. Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.
William Faulkner
#36. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
Gore Vidal
#37. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.
Robert Stone
#38. [Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.
Robert Anton Wilson
#39. From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.
A. E. Hotchner
#40. Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.
Lynn Coady
#41. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#42. I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors.
Vladimir Putin
#43. I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.
Linda McCartney
#44. In 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes).
Madison Smartt Bell
#45. Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
Rex Stout
#46. The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.
Elmore Leonard
#47. The people who go the craziest when they hear the name 'Hemingway' are my English teachers!
Dree Hemingway
#48. If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.
Peter Benchley
#49. I learned from # Hemingway that you could be a # writer and get away with it.
Hunter S. Thompson
#50. Hemingway was very sparse in his writing. Kris Kristofferson is like that. He can take four words and say it all.
Todd Snider
#51. I tell you I always tip. It's a matter of principle with me. I'm like Hemingway. I always do it second-nature.
John Fante
#52. Writing is easy...all you have to do is sit at the typewriter and bleed. -- Ernest Hemingway
Dana Wayne
#53. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.
Woody Allen
#54. From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
Nadine Gordimer
#55. When Pauline Pfeiffer wrote Hadley Hemingway, "I've seen your husband E. Hemingway several times...", how could she not be blamed for breaking up the marriage. I'm not buying that Pauline was naive.
Ruth A. Hawkins
#56. I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.
Paul Auster
#57. Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.
Leslie Fiedler
#58. Hemingway once said "all first drafts are shit". At this point we're just writing for the trash can so don't be too judgmental, just get it out there and onto the screen.
Dan Howe
#59. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.
Laura Mullen
#60. There is no symbolism to these fish, as Hemingway wrote. A cabezon is just a cabezon; a garibaldi, a garibaldi. But what wonderful stories they tell us about life in the ocean!
Susan J. Tweit
#61. What's ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didn't they?
Danielle Steel
#62. 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
#63. I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
Joyce Carol Oates
#64. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.
Adam Haslett
#65. I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.
Ion Tiriac
#66. The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck,
Donald Miller
#67. It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes
until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,
critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove
him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works
of genius?
James N. Frey
#68. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.
Philip Schultz
#69. You have two types of writers: one like Proust who was locked in his room and wrote the masterpiece. And the other type was Hemingway who celebrated life and also wrote a masterpiece.
Paulo Coelho
#70. You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
Jeff Bezos
#71. People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
David Mamet
#72. I don't think I have even achieved fame. Of course, Hemingway says that fame is death's little sister.
Kinky Friedman
#73. What I think is the most important thing to learn about any instrument is the basics of music. Learn your ABCs before you write a Hemingway novel.
Yngwie Malmsteen
#74. Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
James Rollins
#75. Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
Irwin Shaw
#76. Mistakes are the doors of discovery", by James Joyce. A similar one: "A man can be destroyed but not defeated" by Ernest Hemingway. Both remind me that our biggest mistakes are the experiences we learn the most from. Hope to improve gives everyone the desire to live the next day, doesn't it?
Robert Pattinson
#77. An old guy with a Hemingway beard and the build of a girl.
Gillian Flynn
#78. Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don't think I'd enjoy being in the same room with him. He's not my kind of person.
Joe Haldeman
#79. Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
Italo Calvino
#80. 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
#81. I have spent
or wasted
my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games.
Brock Yates
#82. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
#83. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And
Ursula K. Le Guin
#84. The beard was actually less Dumbledore, more Hemingway, but the eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were a brilliant shade of blue that naturally suggested a man who could cast runes and speak to trees. Harper
Joe Hill
#85. I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.
Jude Law
#86. Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#87. If I were an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic, I would drink all my sorrows away. Sadness to me reminds me of Hemingway driving ambulances in the war. No way out. Sadness reminds me of Monroe. No way out.
Abigail George
#88. The best American writers have come from the hinterlands
Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
Edward Abbey
#89. Ernest Hemingway called Jospehine the "most sensational woman anyone ever saw." I think all women deserve to be this sensational looking!
Mia Moretti
#90. I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.
Italo Calvino
#91. Unless you really understand the water, and understand the reason for being on it, and understand the love of sailing and the feeling of quietness and solitude, you don't really belong on a boat anyway. I think Hemingway said one time that the sea is the last free place on earth.
Humphrey Bogart
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.
Elmore Leonard
#95. You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.
Hugh MacLeod
#96. The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.
Adam Mansbach
#97. My favorite micro-short story is by Ernest Hemingway:
For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.
G.M. Potter
#99. I picked up reading late because I grew up dyslexic. When I went to college, a friend who was a big reader got me started on a number of writers, including Hemingway.
Lee Pace
#100. The stories Hemingway told, the life he lived, all of it ended with a squeeze of a finger on a trigger. What else could he have done if he had put the shotgun down, gone back to bed? What would he have learned in that moment of choosing to live, what other books would have been written? Meanwhile,
Kamal Ravikant
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