Hemingway Best Quotes

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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
Ernest Hemingway
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
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
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” “Elton John?” “Close. Ernest Hemingway. In his own way, sort of the rock star of his time.
Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles, #1))
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.
Ernest Hemingway (By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades)
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.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Ernest Hemingway
The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)
Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
Ernest Hemingway (On Writing)
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.
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
The best sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern Michigan in the fall
Ernest Hemingway (Green Hills of Africa)
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.
Ernest Hemingway
I still need some 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 (On Writing)
We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.
Paula McLain (The Paris Wife)
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ​— ​Ernest Hemingway
Penny Reid (Beard Necessities (Winston Brothers, #7))
Best of all he loved the fall the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high blue windless skies…now he will be a part of them forever.
Ernest Hemingway
Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person's fault.
Ernest Hemingway (The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber)
You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.
Ernest Hemingway (The Nick Adams Stories)
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
Ernest Hemingway
To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.” “Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.” Then again, that was my name on it. This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours. What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.
George Saunders (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life)
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. -Ernest Hemingway.
Staci Hart (Wasted Words)
It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.
Ernest Hemingway (The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories)
to whatever extent the Hell’s Angels may or may be latent sadomasochists or repressed homosexuals is to me--after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists--almost entirely irrelevant. There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won’t change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors…but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best.
Hunter S. Thompson
The cynical ones are the best companions. But the best of all are the cynical ones when they are still devout; or after; when having been devout, then cynical, they become devout again by cynicism.
Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)
You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
The cat is the best anarchist.
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working.
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)
I have tried simply to write the best I can; sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway
The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.
Matthew J. Bruccoli
Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn't thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed in that although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was the real one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew it very well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight? Bread is the opium of the people.
Ernest Hemingway
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. -Ernest Hemingway. “And
Staci Hart (Wasted Words)
Ernest Hemingway said it best: "A novel is just like real life, with the boring parts taken out.
Lee Gimenez
There was a time, not so long ago, when the stupid and uneducated aspired to be thought intelligent and cultured people doing their best to feign stupidity.
Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)
It’s a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.
Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within)
You’re going to have things to repent, boy,” Mr. John had told Nick. “That’s one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.
Ernest Hemingway (The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway)
Having an attack of self-doubt about your writing ability? Step #1 - Tell yourself - 'I'm the best damn writer there is, and the world deserves to hear my voice.' Step #2 - Repeat Step #1 until you believe it.
Jonathan Maas
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.
Ernest Hemingway
The reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.
Ernest Hemingway
I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent. Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him).
Rebecca Makkai (The Borrower)
I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let’s pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners.
David B. Lentz (AmericA, Inc.: A Novel in Stream of Voice)
He thought Emily Dickinson was perhaps the best writer America had ever produced; but on this day, heading east out of the Cities, then south down the river, he thought of how some of the writers, Poe and Hemingway in particular, used the weather to create the mood and reflect the meanings of their stories.
John Sandford (Silken Prey (Lucas Davenport #23))
There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head. So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.) They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them” more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks. None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure. They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about. Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice. They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real. So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has. These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.
Lora Mathis
Write the best story you can and throw out all the good lines.
Ernest Hemingway
Despite the media’s best efforts, a few months later, in June, it would become impossible to deny there was a link between mail-in ballots and election fraud.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ​— ​Ernest Hemingway
Sophie Lark (Ivan (Underworld, #1))
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.
Ernest Hemingway
Asla çok uzun konuşmazdık. Birbirimizin hislerini keşfetmenin hazzını yaşardık sadece.
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemingway's best novel)
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.” Excerpt from Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Larry W. Phillips (Ernest Hemingway on Writing)
Ernest Hemingway said cycling was the best way to learn a country’s contours because you physically experience them – you sweat up the hills and there’s the sheer joy of coasting down the other side.
James Clarke (Blazing Bicycle Saddles)
Brevity Is Best: Nicknamed "Silent Cal," President Calvin Coolidge was once challenged by a reporter, saying, "I bet someone that I could get more than two words out of you." Coolidge responded, "You lose." The notion of crafting six word memoirs really took off after Smith Magazine shared this poignant one written by Ernest Hemingway: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." Pithiness Pays Off For Other Reasons: When required to be brief, for example, we gain clarity about what we really mean -- or have to offer. As Mark Twain once wrote, in a slower-paced time, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Kare Anderson (Mutuality Matters How You Can Create More Opportunity, Adventure & Friendship With Others)
When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
Ernest Hemingway
He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones. You kept from thinking and it was all marvellous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it.
Ernest Hemingway
My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. I t was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern I talian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places. Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones. You kept from thinking and it was all marvelous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because 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.
Ernest Hemingway (The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway)
Congratulations Tomi Adeyemi on your breakout novel CHILDREN OF BLOOD AND BONE. A project catching fire, such as this one has, is the hope (not a guarantee) of every storyteller. Hemingway said it best, 'It is the journey that matters, in the end.
A.K. Kuykendall
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. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.
Ernest Hemingway
The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
Ernest Hemingway
I’ve been reading all the time down here. Turgenieff to me is the greatest writer there ever was. Didn’t write the greatest books, but was the greatest writer. That’s only for me of course. Did you ever read a short story of his called The Rattle of Wheels? It’s in the 2nd vol. of A Sportsman’s Sketches. War and Peace is the best book I know but imagine what a book it would have been if Turgenieff had written it. Chekov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer. Tolstoi was a prophet. Maupassant was a professional writer, Balzac was a professional writer, Turgenieff was an artist.
Larry W. Phillips (Ernest Hemingway on Writing)
In the early days writing in Paris I would invent not only from my own experience but from the experiences and knowledge of my friends and all the people I had known, or met since I could remember, who were not writers. I was very lucky always that my best friends were not writers and to have known many intelligent people who were articulate.
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.
Ernest Hemingway (The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway)
But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing’.
Paul Johnson (Intellectuals: A fascinating examination of whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity)
After he and this girl split up in Paris, Roger was on the town; really on the town. He joked about it and made fun of himself; but he was very angry inside for having made such a profound fool of himself and he took his talent for being faithful to people, which was the best one he had, next to the ones for painting and writing and his various good human and animal traits, and beat and belaboured that talent miserably. He was no good to anyone when he was on the town, especially to himself, and he knew it and hated it and he took pleasure in pulling down the pillars of the temple. It was a very good and strongly built temple and when it is constructed inside yourself it is not so easy to pull down. But he did as good a job as he could.
Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream)
So we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix! Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best! He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!
Nick Cave
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But 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.” Green Hills of Africa, p. 22
Larry W. Phillips (Ernest Hemingway on Writing)
My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. These were fragrant, colorless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses and whether they were quetsche, mirabelle or framboise they all tasted like the fruits they came from, converted into a controlled fire on your tongue that warmed you and loosened your tongue. Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties. “Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired. Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.” Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.
Tom Robbins (Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life)
All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive. That was a complicated one. There were not many of them left though. No, there were not many of the gay ones left. There were very damned few of them left. And if you keep on thinking like that, my boy, you won't be left either. Turn off the thinking now, old timer, old comrade. You're a bridge­ blower now. Not a thinker...
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
Where will we have lunch?” I asked Brett. The bar was cool. You could feel the heat outside through the window. “Here?” asked Brett. “It’s rotten here in the hotel. Do you know a place called Botín’s?” I asked the barman. “Yes, sir. Would you like to have me write out the address?” “Thank you.” We lunched up-stairs at Botín’s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)
Ernest Hemingway spent his last years in Ketchum, where he is buried—under a plain flat stone next to a matching one for his fourth wife, Mary. Near the Sun Valley Lodge there’s an artful memorial, set among the trees along a stream. The inscription reads, “Best of all he loved the fall, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams, and above the hills the high blue windless skies. Now he will be a part of them forever. Ernest Hemingway, Idaho, 1939.” The words had been written for a friend’s eulogy, but resonate well for the writer, too.    
Neil Peart (Far and Away: A Prize Every Time)
You were right. Food is communal. Mom once told me that it was no accident that Jesus's first miracle was at a wedding. It was a sign that he was the Master of the Feast---and all celebrations involve a feast. Some of the best, most thankful moments of our lives involve food----almost all, really." I tapped Emma, resting on Jane's lap. "You see it in Austen. She only mentions food as a means to bring characters together, reveal aspects of their nature and their moral fiber. Hemingway does the same, though he skews more towards the drinks. Nevertheless, it's never about the food----it's about what the food becomes, in the hands of the giver and the recipient.
Katherine Reay (Lizzy and Jane)
Think about after the war and when you will paint again. There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing. You can paint the sea better than anyone now if you will do it and not get mixed up in other things. Hang on good now to how you really want to do it. You must hold hard to life to do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. hold it tight. Now is the true time you make your play. Make it now without hope of anything. you always coagulated well and you can make one more real play. We are not the lumpenproletariat. We are the best and we do it for free.
Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream)
That a president is inevitably put forward and elected by the forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of trust, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer. Not that it’s worked out that way. In 1968 Richard Nixon rebounded from his defeat at the hands of Jack Kennedy, and there he was again, his head sunk between the hunched shoulders of his three-button suit and his arms raised in victory, the exacted revenge of the pod people. That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly with never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics, as if it were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.
E.L. Doctorow (Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992)
We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you." - Fierce People Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until… in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. - Aeschylus "A man like to me, Thou shalt love be loved by forever. A hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee!" Robert Browning "Courage is grace under pressure." Ernest Hemingway "For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ― Mahatma Gandhi “Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching "Behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." James Russel Lowell "My God, my Father, and my friend. Do not forsake me in the end." Wentworth Dillon
Robert Browning
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. “For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. “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.” -- Ernest Hemingway
Ezra Pound
Why would anyone write anything after Hemingway, or compose a symphony after Beethoven, or paint a landscape after Turner? It isn't necessarily about doing it better. It's about doing it." "Michael, that isn't what I meant. It's just, why should I slave away in the kitchen when I can just come here and pay for someone really talented to do all the work while I enjoy the results?" "Tell her, Mira," Michael says, reaching back into Renata's dish for another taste. I know what Michael means. If someone told me that I could travel anywhere and eat anything I wanted, choosing, if I so desired, to eat only in Michelin-rated restaurants for the rest of my life, but the price for such a gourmand's dream would be that I could never cook again, I'd turn it down without a moment's hesitation. It's about doing your best by a pile of mussels sweet from the sea, or holding a perfect tomato, warm, rosy, and smelling like summer, and knowing that there are a dozen ways that you can prepare it, each one a delicious homage.
Meredith Mileti (Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses)
Both Cooper and Brennan got their start as extras. Like Brennan, Cooper had learned his craft by roaming around movie lots, absorbing the atmosphere and watching how things were done—especially the subtle interplay between actors, and between the best actors and the camera lens, which always picked up details that not even the most perceptive directors could spot before they were projected onto a screen. And like Brennan, when Cooper got his first two minutes of screen time, he was prepared. Watch him in Wings, playing an aviator about to go to his death, enter a tent and converse with the film’s two stars, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, who are immediately fascinated by his bluff allure. He is a hero without bravado. He is for those two minutes the picture’s star, the very embodiment of what Hemingway called grace under pressure. Cooper’s ability to convey composure just before a dogfight, to act with such quiet courtesy and aplomb, stuns Rogers and Arlen—and just that quickly Cooper takes the picture away from them.
Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.
Gregory Benford (Shipstar (Bowl of Heaven, #2))
Ernest Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them.
Anonymous
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” (Ernest Hemingway)
Morgana Best (A Motive for Murder (Misty Sales #1))
Martha thanks Sylvia, gesturing with the book. "Just remember not to try to hard with understanding it, " Sylvia says. "Like people, they're best not to be too thoroughly understood.
Naomi Wood (Mrs. Hemingway)
Hemingway pounds the table and says "If you're a writer, declare yourself the best writer." He then points across the table and clarifies, "But you're not as long as I'm around, unless you want to put the gloves on and settle it.
David Xavier (How to Be a Storyteller: 7 Steps to Powerful Creativity (How to Write Fiction))
For me, the journal worked best....Silence is a great way to hear our inner wisdom. I didn't realize when I started my grand journal-writing experiment that I had all the answers inside me. Sometimes my inner wisdom took on the form of Mr Miyagi, Percy Kelly, or Ernest Hemingway. I would ask a question of them in my journal and let the pen roll. I didn't care if I was making it up or channeling. Either way, it was away to access my inner wisdom, and it was always soothing and insightful. *Write to learn what you know.* And What did I need to know? First and most obviously was that I had all the inner resources I needed to effectively deal with my situations. And secondly, I needed to realize that I was an artist. Not the one who paints letters about Paris. The artist who is the head honcho creative director of her own life. We must know how to design our lives. we are all artist, and each day is a canvas. Writing in my journal each day was how I redesigned my life. I became conscious of just how much I disliked my day-t-day existence. I would get up, react, and repeat. I had created a fast, busy, messy life. There was no one else to blame.
Janice MacLeod (Paris Letters: A Travel Memoir about Art, Writing, and Finding Love in Paris)
I'm not going to Wichita,' Vladimir said, the word 'Wichita' rendered by his accent as the most foreign word imaginable in the English language. 'I’m going to live with Fran and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to make it all right.' But even as he was laying down the law, his hands were shaking to the point where it was hard to keep the shabby pay-phone receiver properly positioned between his mouth and ear. Teardrops were blurring the corners of his eyes and he felt the need to have Baobab hear him burst out in a series of long, convulsive sobs, Roberta-style. All he had wanted was twenty thousand lousy dollars. It wasn’t a million. It was how much Dr. Girshkin made on average from two of his nervous gold-toothed patients. 'Okay,' Baobab said. 'Here’s how we’re going to do it. These are the new rules. Memorize them or write them down. Do you have a pen? Hello? Okay, Rule One: you can’t visit anyone—friends, relatives, work, nothing. You can only call me from a pay phone and we can’t talk for more than three minutes.' He paused. Vladimir imagined him reading this from a little scrap of paper. Suddenly Baobab said, under his breath: 'Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' 'The two of us can never meet in person,' he was saying loudly now. 'We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' Tree. Their Tree? The Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour. 'Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to…' But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. 'Vladimir, dear, hi!' Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. 'Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?' Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. 'Prava,' he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers. 'Prava, how very now!' Roberta said. 'Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?' 'Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other… There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava… What can I do?… There’s an old Russian sailor… An old lunatic… He needs to be naturalized.' There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. 'It’s a long story…' he began, 'but essentially… I need to… Oh God, what’s wrong with me?' 'Talk to me, you big bear!' Roberta encouraged him. 'Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.' 'Okay, then,' Roberta said. 'I definitely can’t get him his citizenship.' 'No,' Vladimir concurred. 'No, you can’t.' What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old? 'But,' Roberta said, 'I can get him the next best thing…
Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook)
There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman—once lost, it is never recovered.
A.E. Hotchner (The Good Life According to Hemingway)
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. —ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Ariel Lawhon (Code Name Hélène)
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.’” “Elton John?” “Close. Ernest Hemingway.
Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures (Caster Chronicles, #1))
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
M. Prefontaine (The Best Smart Quotes Book: Wisdom That Can Change Your Life (Quotes For Every Occasion Book 12))
To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.” “Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.” Then again, that was my name on it. This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours. What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow. And—to belabor this already questionable metaphor—what will make that shit
George Saunders (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life)
Like many another writer,” Thompson wrote, “Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid—like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.” But what happens when the premise on which these convictions are based changes too rapidly and unpredictably? How do writers whose perspectives have been forged by their experiences within a certain time and place adjust to a new reality—to “the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole?” In other words: how do you stay relevant when the moment in history you’re tasked with rendering is defined by a lack of clarity? “It is not just a writer’s crisis,” Thompson concluded, “but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.
Timothy Denevi (Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism)
Hemingway said that the best thing a writer can have is “a built-in shit detector.
Ed McMahon (Here's Johnny!: My Memories of Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show, and 46 Years of Friendship)
One perception of the way he lived his life has always had the capacity to stir up complex things, to make us uneasy, defensive, secretly troubled about our own less glamorous and more sedentary lives. A characteristic Hemingway letter: the streams of loose syntax, the blunt emotion. The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is conscious. And the rest of it is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say.
Paul Hendrickson (Hemingways Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 - 1961)
I remembered an Ernest Hemingway quote: ‘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 . . . you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.
Robert Penn (It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels)
grandest journeys are not yet made. The American Age, the American Epic, the American adventure has only just begun. Our spirit is still young, the sun is still rising, God’s grace is still shining, and, my fellow Americans, the best is yet to come. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America. Thank you very much.45 With
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
And in conclusion, the entire body of work was propped up by the journalists, editors, and New York publishing machine that adored the man and had the power to make anyone a star. Ernest Hemingway was not a genius. He was, at best, the literary equivalent of a boy band propped up by the adoration of masses of intellectually bankrupt sycophants. He was a fraud.
Arthur Byrne (Killing Hemingway)
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” - Ernest Hemingway
Mark D. Paul (Remember Jane)
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. “For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. “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.” -- Ernest Hemingway
Ezra Pound