Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

Religion is the opium of the poor

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

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.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

You'll ache. And you're going to love it. It will crush you. And you're still going to love all of it.

I felt very lonely when they were all there.

You roll back to me.

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

For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

War is not won by victory.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

Your blood coagulates beautifully.

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope), ...

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.

I'd like to destroy you a few times in bed.

And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.