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.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
Nobel Prize Speech (1954)
- Writing
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
- Writing
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.
Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler
- Writing
The writer’s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.
- Writing
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
- Writing
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
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
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
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Green Hills of Africa (1935), Part I, Ch. 1
- America
- Writing
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write.
A Letter from Cuba (1934)
- Writing
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
- Humor
- Writing
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.
A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 17, “Scott Fitzgerald”
- Genius
- Writing
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson
- Writing
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.
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
- Writing

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