Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.

The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.

The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry.

The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

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.

I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

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

The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Courage is grace under pressure.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

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

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.