Ernest Hemingway

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

Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 – 2 July 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

Quotes

The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.

In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.

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.

I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn...

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

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.

• And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
  • Letter to his family (18 October 1918); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. It was also published in The Oak Parker (Oak Park, IL) on 16 November 1918. Only 19 years old at the time, Hemingway was recovering from wounds suffered at the front line while serving as a Red Cross volunteer.

• 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.
  • The Toronto Star Weekly (4 March 1922)

• 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.
  • "Trout Fishing in Europe" The Toronto Star Weekly (17 November 1923)

• Fuck literature.
  • Letter (1924) to Ezra Pound; published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker, p. 113

• A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
  • Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• The age demanded that we dance
  And jammed us into iron pants.
  And in the end the age was handed
  The sort of shit that it demanded.
  • "The Age Demanded" in Der Querschnitt (February 1925); as quoted in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983) by Noel Riley Fitch

• My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
  • Letter (15 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.
  • Letter to Sherwood Anderson (23 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably be an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• That Muretto di Alassio by Mario Berrino is a beautiful color film.
  • Domenica del Corriere, 1973

• To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or 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
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.
  • "In Another Country" in Men Without Women (1927).

• ‘It’s his sense of self-preservation.’ ‘The great Italian sense.’ ‘The greatest Italian sense.’
  • "Che ti dice la Patria?" in Men Without Women (1927)

• Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 September 1927); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (13 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Grace under pressure
  • Hemingway's famous phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (20 April 1926), published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. In the letter, he wrote that he was "not referring to guts but to something else." The phrase was later used by Dorothy Parker in a profile of Hemingway, "The Artist's Reward," in the New Yorker (30 November 1929)

• I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.
  • Letter to Marlene Dietrich (1 July 1930)

• Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
  • Letter (5–6 January 1932); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Nick Adams of "Fathers and Sons" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)

• Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
  • The old waiter of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)

• That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
  • Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (28 May 1934); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.
  • Letter to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich (11 April 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
  • Postscript to letter to critic, poet and translator Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Everyone tries to frighten you now by saying or writing that if one does not become a communist or have a Marxian viewpoint one will have no friends and be alone. They seem to think that to be alone is something dreadful; or that to not have friends is to be hated. I would rather have one honest friend than most of the friends that I have known.
  • Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 6, 1934-1936, Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale & Miriam B. Mandel, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 333

• I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First, I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state, I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation... I believe in the absolute minimum of government.
  • Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 6, 1934-1936, Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale & Miriam B. Mandel, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 333

• A writer is like a Gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer, he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him. The minute anyone knows any bureaucracy well enough, he will hate it. Because the minute it passes a certain size it must be unjust.
  • Letter to Ivan Kashkin, 19 August 1935, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 6, 1934-1936, Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale & Miriam B. Mandel, Cambridge University Press, 2024, p. 334

• I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i.e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
  • Letter (12 January 1936); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)

• However you make your living is where your talent lies.
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)

• The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Originally in Esquire "Julian" was named as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in "The Rich Boy" (1926) had written: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand..." Fitzgerald responded to this in a letter (August 1936) to Hemingway saying: "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction."

• Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
  • On Ezra Pound, as quoted in The New Republic (11 November 1936)

• Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.
  • Introduction to S. Kip Farrington Jr., Atlantic Game Fishing (1937)

• There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism.
  Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.
  • Address, American Writers Congress, New York City (1937). Reprinted in New Masses (June 22, 1937)

• For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die.
  • "On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)

• As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.
  • "On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)

• The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever...Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.
  • "On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)

• 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.
  • Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler

• I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
  • Letter (26 August 1940); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.
  • In response to Communist writer Mike Gold's criticism of Hemingway's depiction of the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls; as quoted in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life, New York, Scribners, 1969, p. 459.

• Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
  • Introduction to Men at War (1942)

• Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
  • Introduction to Men at War (1942)

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.

• In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
  • Preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944)

• All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
  • Letter (9 April 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
  • Letter (23 July 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.
  • Letter to Malcolm Cowley (17 October 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.
  • Letter to Malcolm Cowley (14 November 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Easy writing makes hard reading.
  • As quoted in Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) by Samuel Putnam, p. 128

• It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.
  • As quoted in "Portrait of Mr. Papa" by Malcolm Cowley in LIFE magazine (10 January 1949)

• Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.
  • Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• 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.
  • Source: quoted in Lillian Ross's profile of Hemingway, which first appeared in the The New Yorker (13 May 1950). The profile was later published as a short book titled Portrait of Hemingway (1961). Variant:
    I started out very quiet and I beat Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

• Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.
  • Letter to Marlene Dietrich (27 June 1950)

• Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
  • Letter (9 July 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
  • Letter (21 February 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
  • Letter (21 February 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.
  • Letter (21 June 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
  • Letter to Bernard Berenson (13 September 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
  • Letter to Bernard Berenson (2 October 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
  • Letter (20 March 1953); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

• You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
  • Letter to Bernard Berenson (24 September 1954); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.
  • As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

• I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
  • Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

• Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there.
  • As quoted in The New York Post (24 January 1957)

• It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them. ... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
  • White, William, ed (1967). By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades by Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 364. 

• We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
  • New York Journal-American (11 July 1961)

• Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it.
  • Letter to F Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted in Scott Fitzgerald (1962) by Andrew Turnbull (1962) Ch. 14

• 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.
  • As quoted in That Summer in Paris (1963) by Morley Callaghan

• I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
  • As quoted in Reporting (1964) by Lillian Ross

• 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.
  • As quoted in Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Co. (1974) by James Mellow

• You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
  • Speaking to his son Gregory, as quoted in Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway

• It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
  • On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson

• You're beautiful, like a May fly.
  • Statement to his future wife Mary Welsh, recalled in her obituaries (26 November 1986)

• Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!
  • From a set of "rules for life" sent to publisher Charles Scribner IV; quoted in Scribner's memoir In the Company of Writers (New York: Scribner, 1991), p. 64

In Our Time (short story collection) (1925)

(full text)

• Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.”
  • Chapter 1

• While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.
  • Chapter 8

• One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Ag could hear them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
  • Chapter 10

• I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing. The street full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them. He was drunk all right. 'You go down after him', said Maera, 'he hates me'.
  • Chapter 15

• They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his head. They came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall. There were six or seven of them including two priests. They were carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the morning. While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my son,” said one priest.
  • Chapter 17

• The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said.
  • Chapter 18

The Torrents of Spring (1926)

• Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.
  • Part 1, Ch. 1 (the opening lines of the novel)
  • The line Yogi Johnson quotes is actually from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. This is one of several misattributed quotes in the novel.

• It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank.
  • Part 2, Ch. 5
  • Harold Stearns was a once-well-known New York writer and intellectual whom Hemingway knew when they were both living in Paris.

• Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.'
  'Sitting Bull's a name I know,' Yogi remarked, shaking hands.
  'Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said.
  • Part 3, Ch. 2

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.

• 'Listen Jake... don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?'
  • Robert Cohn to Jake Barnes, in Book 1, Ch. 2

• I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have.
  • Book 1, Ch. 4

• A bottle of wine was good company.

• All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

• This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.
  • Count Mippipopolous, in Book 1, Ch. 7

• You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.
  • Bill Gorton to Jake Barnes, in Book 2, Ch. 12

• 'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.
  'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'
  • Book 2, Ch. 13
  • Mike's response is often misquoted as "It occurs first very slowly, then all at once."

• 'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.'
  'Yes.'
  'It's sort of what we have instead of God.'
  • Lady Brett Ashley to Jake Barnes, in Book 3, Ch. 19

• 'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, 'we could have had such a damned good time together.'
  Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
  'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'
  • Book 3, Ch. 19 (the last lines of the novel)

Men Without Women (short story collection) (1927)

• Four times he swung with the bull, lifting the cape so it billowed full, and each time bringing the bull around to charge again. Then, at the end of the fifth swing, he held the cape against his hip and pivoted, so the cape swung out like a ballet dancer’s skirt and wound the bull around himself like a belt, to step clear, leaving the bull facing Zurito on the white horse, come up and planted firm, the horse facing the bull, its ears forward, its lips nervous, Zurito, his hat over his eyes, leaning forward, the long pole sticking out before and behind in a sharp angle under his right arm, held half-way down, the triangular iron point facing the bull.
  • The Undefeated

• The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders.
  • In Another Country

• We’ll wait and see. Come on back in the shade, he said. You mustn’t feel that way.
  I don’t feel any way, the girl said. I just know things.
  I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do——
  Nor that isn’t good for me, she said. I know. Could we have another beer?
  All right. But you’ve got to realize——
  I realize, the girl said. Can’t we maybe stop talking?
  They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.
  You’ve got to realize, he said, that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to.
  I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.
  Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.
  Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.
  Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.
  It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.
  Would you do something for me now?
  I’d do anything for you.
  Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?
  • Hills Like White Elephants

• In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.
  • Ten Indians

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

• All thinking men are atheists.
  • Ch. 2

• I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
  • Ch. 15

• You're my religion. You're all I've got.
  • Catherine, in Ch. 18

• Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
  • Ch. 21

• I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
  • Ch. 27

• The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
  • Ch. 34

• No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
  • Ch. 35

• 'Darling, would you like to grow a beard?'
  'Would you like me to?'
  'It might be fun. I'd like to see you with a beard.'
  'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.'
  • Catherine and Henry discussing whether he should grow a beard, in Ch. 38

• That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.
  • One of the alternative endings to the novel, published in A Farewell to Arms The Special Edition.

Death in the Afternoon (1932)

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

The great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.

• About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
  • Ch. 1

• Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

— Ch. 5

• All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
  • Ch. 7

• 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.
  • Ch. 7

• 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.
  • Ch. 9

• Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
  • Ch. 9

• But waiting for a messiah is a long business and you get many fake ones.

— Ch. 9

• The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
  • Ch. 10

• There is no remedy for anything in life. Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes.

— Ch. 10

• 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.
  • Ch. 11

• Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
  • Ch. 11

• Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
  • Ch. 11

• It is always a mistake to know an author.

— Ch. 12

• Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
  • Ch. 16

• If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
  • Ch. 16
  • Hemingway's famous iceberg theory of writing.

• A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
  • Ch. 16

• When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
  • Ch. 16

• There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
  • Ch. 16

• When a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it.

— Ch. 19

• The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.

— Ch. 20

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

"Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba" in Esquire (December 1934)

• All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

• The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

• Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.

• 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.

• If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

• All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Notes on the Next War (1935)

"Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter" first published in Esquire (September 1935)

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.

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.

• War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

• We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

• They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
  • Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country. ~ Horace in Odes, Book 3, Ode 2, Line 13, as translated in The Works of Horace by J. C. Elgood

• Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness: but none of this means anything. 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.

• 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.

Green Hills of Africa (1935)

• All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. [...] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
  • Part I, Ch. 1

• I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.
  • Part I, Ch. 1

• Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
  • Part II, Ch. 2
  • Sentence in bold quoted by Ralph Ellison in the opening paragraph of his autobiographical essay "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" (1964).

• The best sky was in Italy and Spain and northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba.
  • Part II, Ch. 2

• [T]he rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear.
  • Part III, Ch. 1

• They [the best of the Masai] had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it.
  • Part IV, Ch. 1

To Have and Have Not (1937)

• I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is that quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. Its half atheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love.
  • Helen Gordon to her husband Richard Gordon in Ch. 21

• At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager.
  • Ch. 24
  • Often misquoted or inaccurately paraphrased as "In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found."

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The title of this work comes from "Meditation XVII" by John Donne

If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

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.

• I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.
  • Ch. 13

• What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.
  • Ch. 13

• For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

— Ch 13

• If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?

— Ch 13

• 'But are there not many Fascists in your country?'
  'There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes'.
  • Ch. 16

• He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
  • Ch. 30

• That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.

— Ch. 34

• If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
  • Ch 43

• There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.
  • Ch 43

• Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.

— Ch. 43

• 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.

— Ch. 43

Introduction to Treasury for the Free World (1946)

• We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.

• It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of al other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Fascism did.

• No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

• An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

• We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves.

Across the River and into the Trees (1950)

• They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.
  • Ch. 1 (the opening paragraph of the novel)

• 'Tell me some true things about fighting.'
  'Tell me you love me.'
  'I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.'
  • Renata and Colonel Richard Cantwell in Ch. 12

• 'What happens to people that love each other?'
  'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.'
  • Colonel Richard Cantwell and Renata in Ch. 38

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

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

• He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.

• “Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
  “I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”

• Every day above earth is a good day.

• He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

• Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.

• Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

• “Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”

• 'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'

• 'Ay,' he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

• Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

• Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

• You did not do so badly for something that is worthless. But there was a time when I could not find you.

• It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought.
  “Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.”

• Anyone who goes on the sea the year around in a small power boat does not seek danger. You may be absolutely sure that in a year you will have it without seeking, so you try always to avoid it all you can.
  • In "On the Blue Water" Appendix originally published in Esquire April 1936

Nobel Prize Speech (1954)

Delivered from Hemingway's notes by US Ambassador John C. Cabot (10 December 1954) Full text online

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

• No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

• Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

• How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

• A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

Paris Review interview (1958)

You make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Interviewed by George Plimpton Paris Review Issue 18 (Spring 1958); later published in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963)

• You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

• Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

• I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.

• From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

• The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

• Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

• All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.

A Moveable Feast (1964)

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

• If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
  • Epigraph

• As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
  • Ch. 1

• I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
  • Ch. 2

• 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.
  • Ch. 5

• You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens... There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.
  • Ch. 8: 'Hunger Was Good Discipline'

• Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called "Out of Season" and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.
  • Ch. 8

• They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
  • Ch. 11

• Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
  • Ch. 12

• I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
  • Ch. 12

• All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
  • Ch 17; Variant: All things truly wicked start from innocence.
    • As quoted by R Z Sheppard in review of The Garden of Eden (1986) TIME (26 May 1986)

• 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. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
  • An assessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ch. 17

Papa Hemingway (1966)

Quotations of Hemingway from the book by A.E. Hotchner (1966 edition)

• One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.

• 'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'
  • Ernest's own account of how he once chased away a black bear that had been blocking a road. Pt. 1, Ch. 1

• Never confuse movement with action.
  • As quoted by Marlene Dietrich, who added "In those five words he gave me a whole philosophy." Pt. 1, Ch. 1

• Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
  • Pt. 1, Ch. 3

• Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
  • On being informed that Faulkner had said that Hemingway "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary." Pt. 1, Ch. 4

• The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
  • Pt. 1, Ch. 4

• Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 5

• Only three things in my life I've really liked to do - hunt, write and make love.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 5

• You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 5

• To be a successful father ... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 5

• The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 6

• All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 7 - Similar to his remark in "A Letter from Cuba" (1934)

• Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 7

• But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.
  • Pt. 2, Ch. 7

• But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women - that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.
  • On his short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Pt. 2, Ch. 9

• The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.
  • Pt. 3, Ch.12

• You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
  • Statement after seeing David O. Selznick's remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957).

• What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.
  • Pt. 4, Ch. 14 after receiving electric shock therapy for depression

Islands in the Stream (1970)

• The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach.
  It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting at the edge of the Stream, and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.
  • Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 1 (the opening two paragraphs of the novel)

• Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself.
  • Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 4

• Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.
  • Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 8

• 'You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'
  'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
  'Write how you are but make it straight.'
  • Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 10

• 'Shit,' said Eddie. 'What the fuck they kill that Davy for?'
  'Let's leave it alone, Eddy,' Thomas Hudson said. 'It's way past things we know about.'
  • Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 14. Thomas Hudson has just learnt that his sons David ('Davy') and Andrew and their mother were killed in a motor accident.

• Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do.
  Sure and what's your duty? What I said I'd do. And all the other things you said you'd do?
  • Pt. 2: Cuba (a few paragraphs from the end). The 'boy' is Thomas Hudson's last surviving son, Tom, a fighter pilot who was killed in action.

• All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.
  • Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 6

• Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.
  This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.
  • Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 15

• Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.
  • Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 17

• Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though.
  How do you know that? he asked himself. Going away can be final. Walking out the door can be final. Any form of real betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.
  • Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 19

• But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.
  • Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 21

• You never understand anybody that loves you.
  • Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 21 (the last sentence of the novel)

The Dangerous Summer (1985)

• It was strange going back to Spain again: I had never expected to be allowed to return to the country that I loved more than any other except my own and I would not return so long as any of my friends there were in jail. But in the spring of 1953 in Cuba I talked with good friends who had fought on opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War about stopping in Spain on our way to Africa and they agreed that I might honorably return to Spain if I did not recant anything that I had written and kept my mouth shut on politics. There was no question of applying for a visa. They were no longer required for American tourists.
  • Ch. 1 (the opening paragraph of the book)

• They say that if you can stay away from bullfighting for a year you can stay away from it forever. That is not true but it has some truth in it and, except for fights in Mexico, I had been away for fourteen years. A lot of that time though was like being in jail except that I was locked out; not locked in.
  • Ch. 1

• Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.
  • Ch. 1

• Like all truly brave people Antonio is light-hearted and likes to joke and make fun of serious things.
  • Ch. 3
  • Hemingway is describing his friend, the famous bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.

• The faces that were young once were old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. The eyes had not changed and nobody was fat. No mouths were bitter no matter what the eyes had seen. Bitter lines around the mouth are the first sign of defeat. Nobody was defeated.
  • Ch. 9
  • It is July 1959 and Hemingway is in Marceliano's bar in Pamplona, where he has not been since before the Spanish Civil War. In the following paragraph Hemingway mentions for contrast an unpleasant American journalist in his early twenties whose 'handsome young face already showed the traced lines of bitterness around the upper lips.'

• We had spoken about death without being morbid about it and I had told Antonio what I thought about it which is worthless since none of us knows anything about it.
  • Ch. 9

• Any man can face death but to be committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love is more complicated than just facing death. It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer. Antonio had to kill quickly and mercifully and still give the bull one full chance at him when he crossed over the horn at least twice a day.
  Everyone in bullfighting helps everyone else in bullfighting in the ring. In spite of all rivalries and hatreds it is the closest brotherhood there is. Only bullfighters know the risks they run and what the bull can do with his horns to their bodies and their minds.
  • Ch. 9

• Antonio always prayed in the room before the fight at the last when the well-wishers and the followers were gone. If there was time at the ring nearly everyone slipped into the chapel to pray once before the paseo. Antonio knew I prayed for him and never for myself. I was not fighting and I had quit praying for myself during the Spanish Civil War when I saw the terrible things that happened to other people and I felt that to pray for oneself was selfish and egotistical.
  • Ch. 9

• Luis Miguel had the pride of the devil and a feeling of absolute superiority that was justified in many things. He had said so long that he was the best that he really believed it. He had to believe it to go on. It was not just something he believed. It was his belief.
  • Ch. 10
  • Luis Miguel Dominguin was another famous bullfighter and friend of Hemingway's.

• [W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.'
  • Ch. 10
  • Luis Miguel Dominguin had undergone surgery after being wounded in a bullfight. From the context it is clear that his remark about Hemingway was a joke.

• A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can. He can only feel it and hear the crowd's reaction to it. When he feels it and knows that it is great it takes hold of him so that nothing else in the world matters. All the time that he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and his knowledge of the animal. Those matadors are called cold who visibly show that they are thinking of this. Antonio was not cold and the public belonged to him now. He looked up at them and let them know, modestly but not humbly, that he knew it and as he circled the ring with the ear in his hand he looked at the different segments of Bilbao, a city that he loved, as they stood up as he passed and was happy that he owned them.
  • Ch. 13

The Garden of Eden (1986)

• 'But I get so hungry,' she said. 'Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?'
  'When you love somebody.'
  • Catherine and David Bourne in Ch. 1

• 'Please love me David the way I am. Please understand and love me.'
  • Catherine in Ch. 1

• 'I didn't marry her family.'
  'Of course not. But you always do. Dead or alive.'
  • David and Colonel John Boyle in Ch. 7

• 'Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.'
  'You think so?'
  'I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.'
  • Colonel John Boyle and David in Ch. 7

• 'Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.'
  • Marita in Ch. 11

True at First Light (1999)

• A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.
  • Ch. 1

• This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.
  • Ch. 9

• In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.
  • Ch. 10

• When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.
  • Ch. 12

• Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.
  • Ch. 12

• I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.
  • Ch. 17

Disputed

• The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too
  • Claimed to be from Men Without Women, but it does not appear in that work. May have originated in a 2011 blogpost by Marc Chernoff entitled 30 things to stop doing to yourself.

• I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
  • No source in Hemingway's works has been found. May have originated in a 2000 post to the Usenet group alt.support.depression. link

Misattributed

• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, in Chapter 15 "To the Ice"
  • See also https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hemingways-stolen-quotati_b_6868994.
  • Variant: It is good to have an end to a journey, but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

• There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
  • Based on a 1957 Ken Purdy quote, first mentioned in a posthumously published interview with Alfonso de Portago:

    “I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won't be published until this summer,” I told Portago, “something that I thought at the time I wrote it you might have said: that of all sports, only bull fighting and mountain-climbing and motor-racing really tried a man, that all the rest are mere recreations. Would you have said that?”

    “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Portago said.

    • Ken W. Purdy (August 1957) "Portaro; The real story of the sizzling Spaniard" Sports Cars Illustrated (Ziff-Davis: New York) vol. 3 no. 2 p. 63

    “There are three sports that try a man,” she remembered Helmut Ovden saying, “bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.”

    • Ken W. Purdy (27 July 1957) "Blood Sport" The Saturday Evening Post (Curtis: Philadelphia) vol. 230 no. 4 p. 92

  • An early attribution to Hemingway is the essay "Why" by Gene Hill, published in Guns & Ammo and reprinted in 1972 in A Hunter's Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds and Guns (Winchester Press: New York) ISBN 0876910762 p. 96:

    I tend to agree with Hemingway who said something to the effect that only mountain climbing, bull fighting and automobile racing were sports and that everything else was a game.

  • See Barry Popik (May 13, 2012) “Auto racing, bullfighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports—all others are games” The Big Apple

Quotes about Hemingway

American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke? —Gore Vidal

• Why did the chicken cross the road?
  Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
  • Anonymous, answering chicken-cross-the-road jokes in the style of famous writers.

• When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts.
  • 1988 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

• I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
  • James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son (1955)

• Being a professional author is a great job. You get to work at home, be your own boss, and wear whatever you want. Fact: Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises wearing a penguin costume.
  • Dave Barry, You Can Date Boys When You're Forty (2014)

• Below us there were hundreds of men from the British, the Canadian Battalions; a food truck had come up, and they were being fed. A new Matford roadster drove around the hill and stopped near us, and two men got out we recognized. One was tall, thin, dressed in brown corduroy, wearing horn-shelled glasses. He had a long, ascetic face, firm lips, a gloomy look about him. The other was taller, heavy, red-faced, one of the largest men you will ever see; he worse steel-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. These were Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, and they were just as relieved to see us as we were to see them.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 135

• Hemingway was eager as a child, and I smiled remembering the first time I had seen him, at a Writers' Congress in New York. He was making his maiden public speech, and when it didn't read right, he got mad at it, repeating the sentences he had fumbled, with exceptional vehemence. Now he was like a big kid, and you liked him. He asked questions like a kid: "What then? What happened then? And what did you do? And what did he say? And then what did you do?" Matthews said nothing, but he took notes on a folded sheet of paper. "What's your name?" said Hemingway; I told him. "Oh," he said, "I'm awful glad to see you; I've read your stuff." I knew he was glad to see me; it made me feel good, and I felt sorry about the times I had lambasted him in print; I hoped he had forgotten them, or never read them. "Here," he said, reading in his pocket. "I've got more." He handed me a full pack of Lucky Strikes.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 136

• Hemingway did not seem discouraged, but Matthews was. Hemingway said, sure, they would get to the sea, but that was nothing to worry about. It had been foreseen; it would be taken care of; methods had already been worked out for communication between Catalonia and the rest of Spain; by ship, by plane, everything would be all right. Roosevelt, he said, had made an unofficial offer- or so he had been told- to ship two hundred planes to France, if France would ship two hundred planes to Spain. That was one of the best things we had ever heard of Roosevelt, but where were they?
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 138

• For Isaac Kotlarz, reinterpreting the past went together with a certain bad conscience: "Later on, when I read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, I found an enlightenment that did not correspond to the official fables: that reminded me of facts I had heard spoken of in Spain, but which I had not paid attention to at that time."
  • Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (2016)

• I grew up, you know, in a generation of war novels and macho—Hemingway’s being the most prominent.
  • Hortense Calisher Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

• In his history of war correspondence, British author Phillip Knightley, a [Spanish] loyalist sympathizer, chastizes [sic] Hemingway for his "total failure to report the communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of 'untrustworthy' elements on the Republican side [of the Spanish civil war of the 1930s], when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might have prevented further horrors like this."
  • Jack Cashill (2005). Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, Nelson Current, p. 59. Quoting Knightly's The First Casualty (1975)

• Mr. Theodore Kaufman, an American resident, tries to calculate [in his pamphlet Germany Must Perish] how many doctors and how much time it would take to sterilize all Germans. This idea was eagerly taken up by Mr. Ernest Hemingway who defended it in his preface to Men at War on pp. xxiii-xxiv. (New York, 1942.) Scratch a "democrat" and you always find a Nazi.
  • Francis Stewart Campbell, pen name of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1943), Menace of the Herd, or, Procrustes at Large, Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, p. 216

• [Hemingway] has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.
  • William Faulkner during a Q&A session at the University of Mississippi (April 1947)

• I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...I wasn’t alone in being influenced by Hemingway. He had a great impact, I think, on modern Italian writing.
  • Natalia Ginzburg Interview (1992)

• He was a prickly character and rather exacting about financial matters in a way I found tiresome.
  • Natalia Ginzburg Interview (1992)

• D.H. Lawrence, De Maupassant, Chekhov, and Hemingway were also a great influence on me when I first began to write short stories, very different as they all are. But, then who is there, what modern writer of short stories has not been influenced by those four? They created the modern short story.
  • 1982 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)

• Roving was good for the writer; to have been a reporter undoubtedly informed Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane. To know far more than he may ever use is imperative for the writer.
  • Josephine Herbst "The Ruins of Memory" (April 4, 1956) in The Nation

• I would like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculinist bias, in which for example Hemingway's masculinist mythology (and that of many other contemporary American male writers) was perceived as quite as bizarre and hysterical as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist fiction, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective itself would be puzzlingly obsolete.
  • Erica Jong "Blood and Guts: The Tricky Problem of Being a Woman Writer in the Late Twentieth Century" in The Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg (2000)

• Right now I'm going to go to the J.F.K. Library [in Boston] to read the manuscript of The Garden of Eden. That was Hemingway's last book. The published version is not the whole thing; it's only 250 pages. There are two thousand pages of manuscript. Hemingway was trying to find a language that was about relationships and about community. In some senses he failed because now he is known for shooting all those animals, for bullfights and his suicide. But he was reaching for something else. He didn't burn the book; he just left it there. But he wasn't strong enough to see it through to publication. A lot of it has to do with sexual roles, and so I just want to see what he was aiming for. He's got a map of the shape of a novel, and I expect him to take me so far and then I'm going to have to go the rest of the way…he is our father. He is everybody's "papa." He told us he was, so I guess he is [she laughs]. He left some kind of a map. Like I say in China Men, my grandfather left the railroad as a message. Well, Father Hemingway left The Garden of Eden manuscript, and I want to find out where I'm going next.
  • 1991 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

• People should be able to figure out their place in the life-death cycle without killing animals. The trouble is that it relates to what Hemingway said: "You can't be a man until you've killed another one." I say bullshit! Why don't you try it without a gun? Maybe there's a gender difference there. Maybe a woman can do it and a man can't. I hate to say that, but you wonder. It isn't built into women to be hunters in our culture. Even a fisherwoman is unusual. Having a close relationship with an animal, particularly one that lives a short life, can be an intense, constant reminder of mortality.
  • 1994 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin (2008)

• Hemingway, after a honeymoon of Stalinist favor, would receive his share of comradely vituperation a few years later-when he, in his turn, would tell too much about the communists in Spain in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
  • Eugene Lyons (1941) Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, Bobbs-Merrill Company, p. 336

• In an American Literature class, the professor told us The Sun Also Rises was boring on purpose. Apparently, Hemingway was trying to capture Europe's useless frivolity from the 1920s—or something. I had read elsewhere that Hemingway loved every minute of his time over there, and when I said as much the teacher replied, “In this class we go through the author’s intentions and into what the book actually was.”
  What I learned: Hemingway should have taken a Hemingway class.
  • Gavin McInnes, "10 Unbelievable Things I Was Taught In College" Taki's Mag, Nov. 25, 2010

• As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
  • Vladimir Nabokov, The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets, ed. L.S. Dembo and C.N. Pondrom (1972)

• Ernest Hemingway ate an apple before writing./This might or might not have explained his crisp,/short sentences.
  • Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)

• American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
  • Gore Vidal, "Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes," United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

• I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, "The Random House Dictionary" (book review) in The New York Times. Reprinted as "New Dictionary" in Welcome to the Monkey House.

• You have to be an accomplished writer to imitate Henry James. Any journalist can produce a not quite passable imitation of Mr Hemingway. But it was not only the invention in technique that impressed us in Fiesta. It was the mood. English literature is peculiarly rich in first-class Philistine novelists – Surtees and Mr P. G. Wodehouse, for example. But their characters were always happy. Mr Hemingway has melancholy, a sense of doom. His men and women are as sad as those huge, soulless apes that huddle in their cages at the zoo.
  • Evelyn Waugh, 'Winner Takes Nothing', The Tablet (30 September 1950), quoted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (1983), p. 392

• For Whom the Bell Tolls was not at all what the socialists wanted. They had been busy denying atrocities; Mr Hemingway described them in detail with relish. They had denied the presence of the Russians; Mr Hemingway led us straight into the front door of the Gaylord Hotel. He made Marty and la Passionaria as comic as any New Yorker correspondent could have done. From then on he was on the wrong side of the barricades for the socialists, while his pounding revolutionary heart still drove him from civilization.
  • Evelyn Waugh, 'Winner Takes Nothing', The Tablet (30 September 1950), quoted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (1983), p. 393

• Behind all the bluster and cursing and fisticuffs he has an elementary sense of chivalry – respect for women, pity of the weak, love of honour – which keeps breaking in.
  • Evelyn Waugh, 'Winner Takes Nothing', The Tablet (30 September 1950), quoted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (1983), p. 393

• Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness — it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding.
  • Tom Wolfe, Conversations with Tom Wolfe, ed. D.M. Scura (1990)

External links

• Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure
• CNN: A Hemingway Retrospective
• The Hemingway Society
• Brief biography at the official Nobel Prize site
• SparkNotes of The Old Man And The Sea
• Hemingway's Gravesite
• 'Hemingway Goes To War' by Charles Whiting
• The full Paris Review Interview