Ernest Hemingway quote: "I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..."

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics thi...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned ab...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt abo...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see i...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going t...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible....
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of br...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of oth...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things tha...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the pu...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and writ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is usef...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at i...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to b...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something t...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - t...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You're beautiful, like a May fly.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist&...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out y...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

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

If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so trul...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

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

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At on...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

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

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just de...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like d...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over wi...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long adv...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Time is the least thing we have of.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Man is not made for defeat.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the ani...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The shortest answer is doing the thing.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness excep...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder whil...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, th...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the lice...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are f...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fill...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not ha...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it k...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the wri...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are ass...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelin...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Never confuse movement with action.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nad...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. Wh...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while the...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen the...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, workin...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know th...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. B...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and a...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; c...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by p...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you d...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside t...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think y...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, t...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-hab...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the f...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-impor...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families al...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine lik...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The first panacea for a misguided nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they f...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Re...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned ab...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best --make it all up --but make it up so trul...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for th...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards hav...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as imm...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It was a pleasant caf
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of br...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the fun...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

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

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again afte...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

By "guts" I mean, grace under pressure
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency. The second is war. Both brin...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Cowardice ... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imaginatio...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that dist...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a b...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt l...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first t...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage, and ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are f...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

That is the greatest fallacy, the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enoug...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunat...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both brin...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and lik...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to w...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Never mistake motion for action.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The digni...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and a...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

All things truly wicked start from innocence.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I don't know who made the laws; But I know there ain't no law that you got to go hungry.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is be...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

Ernest Hemingway

Share:

Related

More Ernest Hemingway