Ernest Hemingway

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Man is not made for defeat.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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