Ernest Hemingway

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris when you are young, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. - Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. - Ernest Hemingway

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved. - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

There, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelieveably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. (from The Snows of Kilimanjaro) - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true. - Ernest Hemingway

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy. - Ernest Hemingway

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

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. - Ernest Hemingway

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. - Ernest Hemingway

Never confuse motion with action. - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure. - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

There is no friend as loyal as a book. - Ernest Hemingway

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.  - Ernest Hemingway

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. {from 'The Old Man and The Sea'} - Ernest Hemingway

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." - Ernest Hemingway

Paradise: a beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. - Ernest Hemingway

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. - Ernest Hemingway

If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything. - Mrs. Ernest Hemingway