Ernest Hemingway the Novelist, biography, facts and quotes

"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"

"In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason"

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"

"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"

"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love"

"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"

"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age"

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you"

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way"

"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"

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

"I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true"

"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"

"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"

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know"

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it"

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

"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"

"Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth"

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

"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"

"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"

"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination"

"Never confuse movement with action"

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

"Man is not made for defeat"

"I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen"

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

"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"

"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"

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master"

"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"

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened"

"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"

"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"

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book"

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated"

"You're beautiful, like a May fly"

"You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself"

"Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up"

"Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?"

"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"

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

"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"

"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"

"There is no friend as loyal as a book"

"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"

"The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it"

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places"

"The shortest answer is doing the thing"

Born as	Ernest Miller Hemingway
Occup.	Novelist
From	USA
Spouses	Hadley Richardson (1921–1927) Pauline Pfeiffer (1927–1940) Martha Gellhorn (1940–1945) Mary Welsh (1946–1961)
Born	July 21, 1899 Oak Park, Illinois, USA
Died	July 2, 1961 Ketchum, Idaho, USA
Cause	Suicide by gunshot
Aged	61 years

Ernest Hemingway Biography

75 Famous quotes by Ernest Hemingway