Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Below follows famous quotes by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway on golf and punctations:
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
Letter (15 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
Heaven according to Hemingway
To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925)
The joy of letters
Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925)
The greatness of wine
A bottle of wine was good company.
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 September 1927); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
Hemingway explaining guts
Grace under pressure
Hemingways definition of "guts" as recounted by Dorothy Parker in
the New Yorker (30 November 1929)
Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk
since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work
hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else
can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When
you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything
that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't
good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold.
But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression
and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
Postscript to letter to critic, poet and translator Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
Hemingway on the problem with patriotic writers
I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i.e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
Letter (12 January 1936); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
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.
Letter (26 August 1940); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961
(1981) edited by Carlos Baker
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)
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Letter (9 April 1945); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
Letter (9 July 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.
As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)
I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981)
The following are quotes claimed to be of Hemingway but without a known source. If you have any further details on them don't hesitate to contact us to fill out the gaps.
A bitch is a bitch is a bitch.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.
The first draft of anything is shit.