Thoughts by Ernest Hemingway Quotes in English Quotations

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.

It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

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.

The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.

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.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.

No one you love is ever truly lost.

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.

Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

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

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

- Quotation

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

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

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.

To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

Hunger is good discipline.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Isn't it pretty to think so.

When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.

There isnt always an explanation for everything.

Write hard and clear about what hurts.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.

I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

Never mistake motion for action.

The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals.

Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.

Road to hell paved in unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

I am always in love.

So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

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Ernest Hemingway Quotes in English

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.

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I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.

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No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

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All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

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That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

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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.

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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.

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They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

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It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

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No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

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Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports: all others are games.

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Oak Park is a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds.

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There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

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Never confuse movement with action.

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You’re beautiful, like a May fly.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.

In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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 movable feast.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.

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.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

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.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

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.

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 the very simplest 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.

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.

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 style of architecture.

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.

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.

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.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.

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.

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.

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.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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.

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.

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.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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.

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

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

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.

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.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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.

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.

I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

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

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.

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.

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg. *

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

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.

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.

You're beautiful, like a May fly.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.

My big fish must be somewhere.

Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.

When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?

For what are we born if not to aid one another?

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

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 I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

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.

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.

You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel...

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

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.

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

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.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

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.

Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.

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.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

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

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

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

The first draft of anything is shit.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.

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.

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

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

Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.

Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

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.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

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.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

We are all broken - that’s how the light gets in.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

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.

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Never confuse movement with action.

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.

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.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

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.

Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

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

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

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

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 person's duty to understand the world rather than simply fight for it.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?

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

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about. *

Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

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

So far, 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.

I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.

But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.

Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.

You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me.

We're stronger in the places that we've been broken.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

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...

All thinking men are atheists.

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

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.

It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

He'll never be frightened. He knows too damn much.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it.

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.

But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

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

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Courage is grace under pressure.

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.

If my Valentine you won't be,
I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.

Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.

This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it

There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.

It's sort of what we have instead of God.

Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

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

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

I had learned already 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.

And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

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.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.

I felt very lonely when they were all there.

I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

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.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye - that was the trouble - I wanted to kiss you good night - and there's a lot of difference.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it. Doesn’t it sound lovely beyond belief?

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.

Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.

War is not won by victory.