Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

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

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

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.

The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.

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

Time is the least thing we have.

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together

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 didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

The best writing is certainly when you are in love

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her