Hemingway Quotes

1. "...I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers."(1945)"
Author: Albert Camus

2. "I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

3. "There was a pair of books, one by Hemingway, another by Thomas Wolfe. Each had written a long inscription to the other. A knowledgeable dealer had to inform the unfortunate owner who had just paid a pretty penny for them that the inscriptions were not authentic, and that the value was not what he had hoped. Later, another dealer discovered that they were spectacular forgeries: Wolfe had written Hemingway's inscription, and Hemingway, Wolfe's."
Author: Allison Hoover Bartlett

4. "Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative."
Author: Barry Lopez

5. "I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?"
Author: Bridie Clark

6. "Bücher verändern das Schicksal der Menschen. So mancher hat "Der Tiger von Malaysia" gelesen und ist an einer fernen Universität Dozent für Literatur geworden. "Siddharta" hat Zehntausende Jugendliche zum Hinduismus geführt, Hemingway hat sie zu Sportlern gemacht, Dumas hat das Leben Tausender Frauen auf den Kopf gestellt und nicht wenige sind durch ein Kochbuch vor dem Selbstmord bewahrt worden."
Author: Carlos María Domínguez

7. "The bookseller handed me the book and winked."Have a good look at it, little dumpling. I don't want you coming back to me saying I've switched it, eh?""I trust you," I said."Stuff and nonsense. The last guy who said that to me (a tourist who was convinced that Hemingway had invented the fabada stew during the San Fermín bull run) bought a copy of Hamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that. So keep your eyes peeled. In the book business, you can't even trust the index."
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

8. "Style is the answer to everything.A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thingTo do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without itTo do a dangerous thing with style is what I call artBullfighting can be an artBoxing can be an artLoving can be an artOpening a can of sardines can be an artNot many have styleNot many can keep styleI have seen dogs with more style than men,although not many dogs have style.Cats have it with abundance.When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,that was style.Or sometimes people give you styleJoan of Arc had styleJohn the BaptistJesusSocratesCaesarGarcía Lorca.I have met men in jail with style.I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me."
Author: Charles Bukowski

9. "Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that"
Author: D.H. Lawrence

10. "Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it."
Author: David Guterson

11. "My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few."
Author: Debbie Macomber

12. "Stop that!" Ghost Hemingway ordered. "It's like teaching goddamned cats to walk on their back legs." He sighed. "Standing eggs on end in a dining car." He signed again. "Talking to Scotty Fitzgerald sober."
Author: Dennis Vickers

13. "I remember having to read 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and I didn't want to read it; I didn't want to like Ernest Hemingway. I was being a stubborn teenager."
Author: Dree Hemingway

14. "Once, in an interview with 'V' magazine, I said that I preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. I think that Hemingway is an amazing writer, but by being related to him, I had it in my head that I had to like him."
Author: Dree Hemingway

15. "'The Sun Also Rises' by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it."
Author: Elizabeth Olsen

16. "I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories."
Author: Elmore Leonard

17. "I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words."
Author: Elmore Leonard

18. "For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color."- Ernest Hemingway,"
Author: Ernest Hemingway

19. "When asked in the 1958 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton what had stumped him, Hemingway said, "Getting the words right."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

20. "What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?"
Author: Gore Vidal

21. "Hemingway was a jerk."
Author: Harold Robbins

22. "Mike Walker is the Hemingway of gossip."
Author: Howard Stern

23. "You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own."
Author: Hugh MacLeod

24. "T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right."
Author: Iris Murdoch

25. "One gets the impression that this is how Ernest Hemingway would have written had he gone to Vassar."
Author: Jack Paar

26. "Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald."
Author: James Rollins

27. "You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night."
Author: James Thurber

28. "My love is a six-toed mutant, like a Hemingway cat. Pet it wisely."
Author: Jarod Kintz

29. "Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'.- M.F.K. Fisher "A Is for Dining Alone"
Author: Jenni Ferrari Adler

30. "I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there."
Author: Jim Harrison

31. "Carol would not be a bad one to [settle down] with. She's pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She's good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn't understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I'm a government-inspected horse's ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he signed. Faulkner was her most recent god[.]"
Author: John Dunning

32. "Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein."
Author: Leslie Fiedler

33. "I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention."
Author: Linda McCartney

34. "Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be."
Author: Malcolm Cowley

35. "Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure--in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically."
Author: Marge Piercy

36. "...who is the pioneer of modern journalism? Not Hemingway who wrote of his experiences in the trenches, not Orwell who spent a year of his life with the Parisian poor, not Egon Erwin Kisch the expert on Prague prostitutes, but Oriana Fallaci who in the years 1969 to 1972 published a series of interviews with the most famous politicians of the time. Those interviews were more than mere conversations; they were duels. Before the powerful politicians realized that they were fighting under unequal conditions--for she was allowed to ask questions but they were not--they were already on the floor of the ring, KO'ed."
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters."
Author: Nadine Gordimer

38. "Who hasn't thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It's an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they'd be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn't be responsible for them anymore. I'd have left behind something that spoke for itself."
Author: Ned Vizzini

39. "Like Hemingway said, the only thing that could spoil a day was people."
Author: Nikki Sixx

40. "Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary"
Author: Pat Conroy

41. "Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for."
Author: Rex Stout

42. "The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote."
Author: Rex Stout

43. "The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village."
Author: Roald Dahl

44. "It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends."
Author: Stephen Fry

45. "There is no symbolism to these fish, as Hemingway wrote. A cabezon is just a cabezon; a garibaldi, a garibaldi. But what wonderful stories they tell us about life in the ocean!"
Author: Susan J. Tweit

46. "I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM."
Author: Tiffany Madison

47. "To be or not to be tethered to the sordid, sickly, stinking, sappy apron strings of Hollywood and its endless fondness for fu**ing your sh** up. If Shakespeare were alive today, I bet he'd write a scintillating soliloquy about the Broken Brood of Big Shots. I bet he'd help you out, Micky Affias, ol' Will the Bard would. Listen, we'll come visit you. Okay? I'll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray' as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway, and we'll write on your white-room walls. We'll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")"
Author: Tim Cummings

48. "This is Teenage madness. Trapped in a room knowing there's more outside. Trapped listening to a teacher talk about Hemingway as if each sentence and word had mythical importance. Trapped knowing she is in the room with me."
Author: Travis Thrasher

49. "She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it."
Author: Truman Capote

50. "Barbs at their best…Faulkner on Hemingway:"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."Hemingway on Faulkner:"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
Author: William Faulkner

Hemingway Quotes Pictures