Author Profile
Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961 • American • Novelist
101
Total Quotes
Top Topics
Collected Meditations
Showing 101 quotesOnce writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
topics:
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.— Ernest Hemingway
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.— Ernest Hemingway
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.— Ernest Hemingway
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway
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.— Ernest Hemingway