Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.
— Ernest Hemingway
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
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.
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
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.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.
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.
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.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
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.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
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 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.
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.
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.
I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.
Time is the least thing we have of.
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.
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.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
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.
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.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
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.
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
