“Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...”
— Ernest Hemingway
“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
“My big fish must be somewhere.”
“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.”
“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”
“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
“No one you love is ever truly lost.”
“Being against evil doesn’t make you good.”
“When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.”
“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
“Live it up so you can write it down.”
“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”
“Remember everything is right until it’s wrong. You’ll know when it’s wrong.”
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
“The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.”
“The circus is the only fun you can buy that is good for you.”
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
“I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.”
“The smallest coffins are the heaviest.”
“To hell with luck. I’ll bring the luck with me.”
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”
“You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.”
“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
“Religion is the opium of the poor.”
“The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”
“Work could cure almost anything.”
“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 don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”
“I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.”
“You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.”
“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.”
“I had an inheritance from my father, It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, The spending of it’s never done.”
“To be successful in writing, use short sentences.”
“I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
“Once in Africa I lost the corkscrew and we were forced to live off food and water for weeks.”
“I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.”
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.”
“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
“When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cold and you warm as you write.”
“The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.”
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