The quotations of

Ernest Hemingway

American author and journalist

1899–1961

51 quotes, most often on Writing, War & Peace and Life & Death. Part of the Writers collection.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?
- Sleep
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Introduction to Men at War (1942)
- Courage
All thinking men are atheists.
A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ch. 2In context
- Atheism
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 20
- Good & Evil
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
- Writing
That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (13 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
- Art
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 11
- Life & Death
- Writing
Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.
Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
- Writing
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.
A Letter from Cuba (1934)
- Clever Jabs
- Journalism
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.
Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 9
- Art
- Honor
Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.
Introduction to “On the Blue Water” (April 1936)
- War & Peace
A serious writer is not to be confused 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.
Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
- Writing
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.
In The Toronto Star Weekly (4 March 1922)
- Comedy
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Notes on the Next War (1935)
- Patriotism
- War & Peace
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
- Writing

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