Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.

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.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

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

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places…

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly in the only heritage he has to leave.

There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self.

Time is the least thing we have.

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

You lose it if you talk about it.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

The first draft of anything is shit.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again." "Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?" "Yes. I want to ruin you." "Good," I said. "That's what I want too.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

All thinking men are atheists.