Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Quotes

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

Listening
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Grace under Pressure.
Live life to the fullest.
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
But did thee feel the earth move?
I'm not going to climb into the ring with Tolstoy.
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.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk.
That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
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.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

Money, War & Peace
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.

Morality
There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Reading
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.

Education
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.

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

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

Truth & Lies
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.

Writing
Never mistake motion for action.

Work
The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.

Miscellaneous