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"

"The shortest answer is doing the thing"

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

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime"

"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"

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

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

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

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

"The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without"

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

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them"

"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"

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

"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"

"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"

"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"

"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy"

"The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green"

"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"

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward"

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

"Courage is grace under pressure"

"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated"

"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"

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

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools"

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut"

"All things truly wicked start from innocence"

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge"

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

"Never confuse movement with action"

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