Ernest Hemingway

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

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

Courage is grace under pressure.

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

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

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

Time is the least thing we have of.

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

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

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

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

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

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

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

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.

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

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.

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

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

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Man is not made for defeat.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

A serious writer is not to be confounded 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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