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 age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace.
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.'
War is not won by victory.
The bullfight is not a sport in the sense of giving expression to the impulses and mastery of an individual's strength over the strength of a beast.
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole mind of the country.
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see it right and take a great interest in it.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Nobel Prize can be sore about the thing.
If you have anything to say, anything you feel, and you are going to be a writer, write it.
The hardest thing to do is to convey the feeling of a landscape.
I have a good life, but I am not a happy man.
The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
We are stronger in the places that have been broken.
A serious writer is one who has something to say.
Life is just one damned thing after another.
The good parts of a book may be only the gaps between the bad pages.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, numbers of roads, names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
I love you and I want to be with you. I don't want to live anywhere else.
You'll lose it, you know. The good life. You'll lose it.
Isn't it pretty to think so?
Contemporaries of Ernest Hemingway
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961).