Quotes By 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.

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.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

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

Man is not made for defeat.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

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

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

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.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

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

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

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

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.