Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

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

You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.

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

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.

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.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

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

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it… Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

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.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.