Quotes from 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.

It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

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.

I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.

The rich were dull and they drank too much…. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money.

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 of.

It makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch…. It's sort of what we have instead of God.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports. . . all others are games.

Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.

Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .

But in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

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.

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try…

Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral.

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.