Ernest Hemingway

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

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 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.

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.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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.

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

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

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

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.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

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.

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.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

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

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

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

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.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

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.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

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

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.

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

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

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

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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

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.

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.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

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.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

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