Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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Ernest Hemingway

Profession : Novelist

Birth : July 21, 1899

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Ernest Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Ernest Hemingway

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Ernest Hemingway

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

Ernest Hemingway

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

Ernest Hemingway

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Ernest Hemingway

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Ernest Hemingway

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

Ernest Hemingway

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

Ernest Hemingway

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

Ernest Hemingway

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

Ernest Hemingway

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ernest Hemingway

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Ernest Hemingway

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

Ernest Hemingway