100+ Timeless Ernest Hemingway Quotes to Inspire Courage, Life, and the Art of Writing

Updated 2024/12/06

July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961
American
Novelist, poet, journalist
Wrote masterpieces such as “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Farewell to Arms,” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954

“Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.”
“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
“The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
“Time is the least thing we have of.”
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
“Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.”
“You’re beautiful, like a May fly.”
“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.”
“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.”
“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
“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.”
“For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”
“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.”
“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.”
“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.”
“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.”
“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”
“I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.”
“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.”
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
“A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
“Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.”
“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
“Man is not made for defeat.”
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
“Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.”
“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.”
“If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”
“‘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.”
“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.”
“When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”
“Wars are caused by undefended wealth.”
“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.”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“Never mistake motion for action.”
“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.”
“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”
“You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
“When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.”
“Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
“That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.”
“I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.”
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
“I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
“For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.”
“I rewrote the ending to ‘Farewell to Arms,’ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.”
“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
“There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.”
“Courage is grace under pressure.”
“A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.”
“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
“I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”
“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
“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.”
“To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.”
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”
“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.”
“I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.”
“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”
“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.”
“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.”
“The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”
“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”
“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.”
“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
“All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.”
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
“In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.”
“I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”
“All things truly wicked start from innocence.”
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”