Ernest Hemingway: Trending quotes (page 12)

“I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.”

Ernest Hemingway

“The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Sun Also Rises

World

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

Ernest Hemingway

Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: 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.

People , Time

“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

Time

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

“But did thee feel the earth move?”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Feeling

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

Ernest Hemingway

Paris Review interview (1958)

Death , Pleasure

“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?”

Ernest Hemingway

Faith , Dogs , Question

“I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Baby

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Time

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

Ernest Hemingway

Based on a 1957 Ken Purdy quote, first mentioned in a posthumously published interview with Alfonso de Portago: note: :“I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won't be published until this summer,” I told Portago, “something that I thought at the time I wrote it you might have said: that of all sports, only bull fighting and mountain-climbing and motor-racing really tried a man, that all the rest are mere recreations. Would you have said that?”
I tend to agree with Hemingway who said something to the effect that only mountain climbing, bull fighting and automobile racing were sports and that everything else was a game.
Source: Ken W. Purdy (August 1957) "Portaro; The real story of the sizzling Spaniard" https://archive.org/details/sim_car-and-driver_1957-08_3/page/n70 Sports Cars Illustrated (Ziff-Davis: New York) vol. 3 no. 2 p. 63 note: :“There are three sports that try a man,” she remembered Helmut Ovden saying, “bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.”
Source: Ken W. Purdy (27 July 1957) "Blood Sport" https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1957-07-27_230_4/page/92 The Saturday Evening Post (Curtis: Philadelphia) vol. 230 no. 4 p. 92
Source: An early attribution to Hemingway is the essay "Why" by Gene Hill, published in Guns & Ammo and reprinted in 1972 in A Hunter's Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds and Guns (Winchester Press: New York) ISBN 0876910762 p. 96

Mountain , Game , Sport

“Religion is the opium of the poor”

Ernest Hemingway

Religion

“Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Thinking

“I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.”

Ernest Hemingway

People

“Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”