Ernest Hemingway

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

“A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.”

“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

“In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”

“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.”

“When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”

“Wars are caused by undefended wealth.”

“Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.”

“I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.”

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

“I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.”

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

“I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.”

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

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

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

“When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

“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.”

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

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

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

“When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.”

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

“The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”

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

“Man is not made for defeat.”

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

“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.”

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“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 learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

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

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”

“And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.”

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”

“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.”

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

“The age demanded that we danceThe sort of shit that it demanded.”

“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.”

“I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.”

“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.”

“God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.”

“I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“That Muretto di Alassio by Mario Berrino is a beautiful color film.”

“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”

“I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.”

“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”

“‘It’s his sense of self-preservation.’ ‘The great Italian sense.’ ‘The greatest Italian sense.’”

“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.”

“That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”

“I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.”

“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”

“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.”

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 by 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.”

“However you make your living is where your talent lies.”

“You are going to die like a dog for no good reason”

“The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."”

“Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.”

“Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.”

“Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.”

“There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism.Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.”

“For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die.”

“As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.”

“The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever...Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”

“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.”

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”

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

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

“It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”

“You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.”

“Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”

“Easy writing makes hard reading.”

“It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.”

“I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”

“Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.”

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

“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”

“You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.”

“Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”

“Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).”

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”

“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”

“When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there.”

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them. … Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar 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.”

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched 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.”

“If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”

“You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

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

“Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.”

“Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.''Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said.”

“'Listen Jake... don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?'”

“A bottle of wine was good company.”

“All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

“I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.”

“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.”

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”

“'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'”

“'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.''It’s sort of what we have instead of God.'”

“In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”

“All thinking men are atheists.”

“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

“Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.”

“I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.”

“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 it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

“'Darling, would you like to grow a beard?'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.'”

“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.”

“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

“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.”

“Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.”

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

“The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.”

“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his 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.”

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“What is an hour?'”

“Man is not made for defeat.”

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

“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. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.”

“Personal columnists … are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him.”

“If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.”

“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”

“War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”

“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.”

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

“We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

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

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. […] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

“I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

“Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.”

“The best sky was in Italy and Spain and northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba.”

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

“[T]he rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear.”

“I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.”

“What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.”

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

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

“'But are there not many Fascists in your country?' 'There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes'.”

“He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.”

“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

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

“A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.”

“There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.”

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

“If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?”

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.”

“That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.”

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

“We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.”

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of al other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Facism did.”

“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

“An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”

“We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves.”

“'Tell me some true things about fighting.''I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.'”

“'What happens to people that love each other?''I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.'”

““Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?” “I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.””

“Every day above earth is a good day.”

“Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.”

“Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.”

“'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'”

“'Ay,' he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.”

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”

“You did not do so badly for something that is worthless. But there was a time when I could not find you.”

“No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”

“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”

“From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.”

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

“All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

“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."”

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“All thinking men are atheists.”

“You see, I am 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.”

“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.”

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

“I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.”

“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”

“Never mistake motion for action.”

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”

“One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.”

“Never confuse movement with action.”

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

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

“The fish is my friend too... I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought”

“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”

“Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“Only three things in my life I've really liked to do - hunt, write and make love.”

“You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.”

“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.”

“The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.”

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

“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying.”

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

“But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.”

“Courage is grace under pressure.”

“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.”

“But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women - that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.”

“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”

“What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.”

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

“Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself.”

“Never mistake motion for action.”

“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.”

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

“'You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''Write how you are but make it straight.'”

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

“'Shit,' said Eddie. 'What the fuck they kill that Davy for?''Let's leave it alone, Eddy,' Thomas Hudson said. 'It's way past things we know about.'”

“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.”

“Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do.Sure and what's your duty? What I said I'd do. And all the other things you said you'd do?”

“I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.”

“All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.”

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

“Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.”

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.”

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though.How do you know that? he asked himself. Going away can be final. Walking out the door can be final. Any form of real betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.”

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

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

“But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.”

“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.”

“You never understand anybody that loves you.”

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”

“They say that if you can stay away from bullfighting for a year you can stay away from it forever. That is not true but it has some truth in it and, except for fights in Mexico, I had been away for fourteen years. A lot of that time though was like being in jail except that I was locked out; not locked in.”

“I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.”

“Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.”

“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”

“I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.”

“Like all truly brave people Antonio is light-hearted and likes to joke and make fun of serious things.”

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

“From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.”

“The faces that were young once were old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. The eyes had not changed and nobody was fat. No mouths were bitter no matter what the eyes had seen. Bitter lines around the mouth are the first sign of defeat. Nobody was defeated.”

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“We had spoken about death without being morbid about it and I had told Antonio what I thought about it which is worthless since none of us knows anything about it.”

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

“Antonio always prayed in the room before the fight at the last when the well-wishers and the followers were gone. If there was time at the ring nearly everyone slipped into the chapel to pray once before the paseo. Antonio knew I prayed for him and never for myself. I was not fighting and I had quit praying for myself during the Spanish Civil War when I saw the terrible things that happened to other people and I felt that to pray for oneself was selfish and egotistical.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Luis Miguel had the pride of the devil and a feeling of absolute superiority that was justified in many things. He had said so long that he was the best that he really believed it. He had to believe it to go on. It was not just something he believed. It was his belief.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which”

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

“[W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.'”

“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.”

“'But I get so hungry,' she said. 'Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?''When you love somebody.'”

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

“Please love me David the way I am. Please understand and love me.”

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”

“All things truly wicked start from innocence.”

“'I didn't marry her family.''Of course not. But you always do. Dead or alive.'”

“Time is the least thing we have of.”

“'Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.''I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.'”

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”