Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

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.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.

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

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Before you act; Listen, before you react; Think, before you spend; Earn, before you criticize; Wait, before you pray; Forgive, before you quit; Try.

I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

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

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bi...ed 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.

One cat just leads to another.

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.

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.

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

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

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of sh.. that it demanded.

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

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

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

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.