Disputed
Source: Claimed to be from Men Without Women, but it does not appear in that work. May have originated in a 2011 blogpost by Marc Chernoff entitled 30 things to stop doing to yourself http://www.marcandangel.com/2011/12/11/30-things-to-stop-doing-to-yourself/.
Ernest Hemingway: Thing
Ernest Hemingway was American author and journalist. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Ernest Hemingway:
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“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
Marita in Ch. 11
Source: The Garden of Eden (1986)
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
Part IV, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 10
“But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.”
Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 21
Islands in the Stream (1970)
“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
Source: A Farewell to Arms
“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”
Ch 17; Variant: All things truly wicked start from innocence.
As quoted by R Z Sheppard in review of The Garden of Eden (1986) TIME (26 May 1986)
A Moveable Feast (1964)
Letter to Sherwood Anderson (23 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Context: 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.
A Letter from Cuba (1934)
Context: The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
Letter to Bernard Berenson (24 September 1954); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Context: You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
Nobel Prize Speech (1954)
Context: Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. 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.
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
Source: A Farewell to Arms