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“As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Ernest Hemingway

As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

“They say that if you can stay away from bullfighting for a year you can stay away from it forever. That is not true but it has some truth in it and, except for fights in Mexico, I had been away for fourteen years. A lot of that time though was like being in jail except that I was locked out; not locked in.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 1

“However you make your living is where your talent lies.”

Ernest Hemingway

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)

“A bottle of wine was good company.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

“We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.”

Ernest Hemingway

Introduction to Treasury of the Free World (1946)

“I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is that quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. Its half atheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love.”

Ernest Hemingway book To Have and Have Not

Helen Gordon to her husband Richard Gordon in Ch. 21
To Have and Have Not (1937)

“Every day above earth is a good day.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (5–6 January 1932); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

“It was strange going back to Spain again: I had never expected to be allowed to return to the country that I loved more than any other except my own and I would not return so long as any of my friends there were in jail. But in the spring of 1953 in Cuba I talked with good friends who had fought on opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War about stopping in Spain on our way to Africa and they agreed that I might honorably return to Spain if I did not recant anything that I had written and kept my mouth shut on politics. There was no question of applying for a visa. They were no longer required for American tourists.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 1 (the opening paragraph of the book)

“Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called "Out of Season" and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 8

“We had spoken about death without being morbid about it and I had told Antonio what I thought about it which is worthless since none of us knows anything about it.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 9

“Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 1

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 7

“Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.”

Ernest Hemingway

Introduction to S. Kip Farrington Jr., Atlantic Game Fishing (1937)

“Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

“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

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”

Ernest Hemingway

Speaking to his son Gregory, as quoted in Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway