Ernest Hemingway Quotes

American author and journalist (1899–1961)

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Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 – 2 July 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

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Native Name: Ernest Miller Hemingway

Also Known As: Papa

Alternative Names: Hemingway • Ernest Miller Hemmingway • E. M. Hemmingway • E. Hemmingway • E. Hemingway • Ernest M. Hemingway

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Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

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

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.

I am always in love.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

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

It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.

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.

No one you love is ever truly lost.