Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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Ernest Hemingway

Profession : Novelist

Birth : July 21, 1899

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.

Ernest Hemingway

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

Ernest Hemingway

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Ernest Hemingway

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

Ernest Hemingway

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

Ernest Hemingway

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

Ernest Hemingway

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Ernest Hemingway

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Ernest Hemingway

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

Ernest Hemingway

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Ernest Hemingway

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Ernest Hemingway