A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
A serious writer is not to be confounded 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.
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 good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
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.
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Courage is grace under pressure.
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
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.
Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.
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.
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
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.
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
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.
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.
I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
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 like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
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.
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
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.
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.
In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Man is not made for defeat.
Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Never confuse movement with action.
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Never mistake motion for action.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
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.
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.
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.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
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.
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.
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.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
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.
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
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.
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
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.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
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.
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 simple 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.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
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.
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.
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.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
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.
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.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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.
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
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.
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.
Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
There is no hunting like the hunting of men, especially armed men, and those who have done this long enough to like it...they never care for anything else thereafter.
Was awarded the 1954 Nobel prize in literature.
Born at 8:0am-CST
Pictured on a 25? US commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued 17 July 1989.
For a man who survived two plane crashes, it's somewhat ironic that he would take his own life in the end. He is the grandfather of sister actresses Mariel Hemingway and the late Margaux Hemingway (also a suicide, in 1996, as was her great-grandfather, Ernest's father).
It's estimated Hemingway left behind over 8,000 personal and business letters, and plans were announced in May 2002 to attempt to collect and publish most of them in a set that could exceed 10 volumes.
Grandfather of actresses Mariel Hemingwayand Margaux Hemingway
Unlike his great contemporaries Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Steinbeck, Hemingway never wrote for the movies, but he had no objection to selling his novels and short stories for good prices to producers.
A.E. Hotcher, in his 1966 memoir of his friendship with "Papa Hemingway." reports that the great writer chose him in the late 1950s as his emissary to Hollywood to sell the Nick Adams stories. Hemingway, hobbled by mental illness and bad health, wanted an unprecedented $1 million for the movie rights to the stories, but Hotchner was only able to get him $100,000. The stories are the basis for Martin Ritt's film "Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man" (1962), which came out the year after Papa's death. Hotchner wrote the screenplay, as he did for the tele-play "The World of Nick Adams" (1957).
Hemingway suffered from bipolar disorder, then known as manic depression, and was treated with electroshock therapy at the Menninger Clinic. The therapy, he claimed, had destroyed his memory, which was essential to a writer, and he told his friend A.E. Hotchner that his memory loss was one of the reasons he no longer wanted to live. The condition was hereditary: Hemingway's father Clarence likely suffered from it, as did at least one of his sisters, Ursula, and his only brother, Leicester, as did one of his sons, Gregory, and his granddaughter Margaux. In addition to Ernest, Hemingway's father Clarence, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and his granddaughter Margaux all committed suicide. His son Gregory died in police custody after being picked up in a stupor shortly after a sex change operation.
His house in Key West, Florida, where he wrote a good deal of his literature, is now a museum in his honor. One other interesting note about the house is that the lineage of cats that live there hereditarily have six toes on each foot, going back to Hemmingway's own cats.
One son, John (Jack or Bumby) with first wife; two sons, Patrick and Gregory, with second. Only Patrick survives as of this writing (June 2005).
He was married four times, and dedicated a book for each wife during the time he was married to them.
He admired Russian writers Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov among others.
Long considered a likely Nobel Laureate for Literature, Hemingway was disappointed when in 1950, William Faulkner became the first American writer of their generation to cop the Prize. Hemingway's 1949 novel "Across the River and Into the Trees" (1949) had been a notable failure, and likely cost him the honor of being the first American since Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Hemingway returned to his original, simple style for The Old Man and the Sea (1958), his 1952 novella that won him the Pulitzer Prize. After two plane crashes gave him the opportunity to read his own obituary, he finally won the Nobel Prize in 1954, in large part due to the extraordinary success of "Old Man". Hemingway himself was initially involved in the production of his book, although the extent of his participation after selling his book was to go marlin-fishing off the coast of Peru to try to find a fish worthy enough for the picture. In the end, the producers used a rubber marlin and stock footage of marlin fishing in which Hemingway didn't participate in. After seeing the film, Ernest Hemingway expressed his disappointment and said that Spencer Tracy looked less the Cuban peasant fisherman and more the rich old actor that he was. Tracy won an Oscar nomination for the role.
Hemingway, perhaps the most prominent of the American supporters of the Spanish Republic during the Civil War against Franco's fascist Falangists, said that Alvah Bessie's Spanish Civil War novel "Men in Battle" (1939) was one of the best war novels of its time. Hemingway's own Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a best-seller.
Much of his writing reflects his dissatisfaction with modern culture.
The city of Key West, Florida, has an Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest every year.
Although it was not used, he proposed the following epitaph for his tombstone: "Pardon me for not getting up.".
Journalist Hunter S. Thompson was an admirer of Hemingway and his writing. He later wrote an article about Hemingway's later life and death titled, "What Lured Hemingway to Ketcham". The article can be found in Thompson's book, "The Great Shark Hunt".
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