Ernest Hemingway
Master of understated prose, Nobel laureate
Most quoted
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one 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."
— from A Farewell to Arms, 1929
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you have 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."
— from Death in the Afternoon, 1964
"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."
— from Death in the Afternoon (posthumously published preface), 1964
All quotes by Ernest Hemingway (235)
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
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.
Courage is grace under pressure.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
The first and last thing a writer has to do is to write.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
When people talk, listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen.
The most painful thing is to lose yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
Write drunk, edit sober.
The earth is a fine place and worth fighting for.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
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.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
To be a good writer, you must have a good ear.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.
Contemporaries of Ernest Hemingway
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961).