Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.

I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe, the older waiter said. With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night. I want to go home and into bed. We are of two different kinds, the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.

Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.

I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.

Besides, I'm not jealous. I'm just so in love with you that there isn't anything else.

I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way.

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.

I don't know. There isn't always an explanation for everything.

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.

I kissed her neck and shoulders. I felt faint with loving her so much.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

Please understand and love me.

Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

I know you're right. I'm just low, and when I'm low I talk like a fool.

I don't like to leave anything,' the man said. 'I don't like to leave things behind.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

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.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down a a typewriter and bleed. E. Hemmingway We don't write to be understood, we write to understand......... Love yourself. Dare to dream. Live on purpose!

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...