“In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”
“A person with increasing knowledge and sensory education may derive infinite enjoyment from wine.”
“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.”
“You’ll lose it, if you talk about it.”
“When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.”
“There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.”
“She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.”
“Summer is a discouraging time to work – you don’t feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.”
“I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn’t.”
“But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
“No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.”
“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”
“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”
“You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.”
“I am so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.”
“Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.”
“Good dialogue is not real speech-it’s the illusion of real speech.”
“You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.”
“And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.”
“In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”
“He’ll never be frightened. He knows too damn much.”
“But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.”
“Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn’t help it.”
“Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.”
“Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, “What will you have, sir?” And I said, “A glass of hemlock.””
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”
“We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance.”
“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 try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.”
“Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you’ve seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That’s good practice, but it isn’t creative writing.”
“Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well.”
“He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.”
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
“Hunger is good discipline.”
“Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.”
“The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don’t worry.”
“That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.”
“The only decent bone in her body was mine.”
“But you always fall for somebody else and then it’s all right. Fall for them but don’t let them ruin you.”
“The most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen.”
“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
“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.”
“Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.”
“I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.”
“You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.”
“Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.”
“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”
“Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”
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