“You never understand anybody that loves you.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“No one ever stopped when they were winning.”
“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.”
“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
“Drinking is a way of ending the day.”
“Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.”
“We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.”
“Don’t you like to write letters? I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.”
“In those days, there was no money to buy books.”
“Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.”
“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”
“We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man’s duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.”
“Everything that’s innocent to us is crazy to them.”
“For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.”
“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.”
“The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.”
“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”
“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”
“There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.”
“Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.”
“Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”
“Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.”
“If a writer stops observing, he is finished.”
“In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found.”
“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.”
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.”
“I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.”
“Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”
“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.”
“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.”
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
“He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.”
“I am so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.”
“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important.”
“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.”
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”
“I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.”
“But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.”
“He’ll never be frightened. He knows too damn much.”
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