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. – Ernest Hemingway
That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
I rewrote the ending to ‘Farewell to Arms,’ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. – Ernest Hemingway
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
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. – Ernest Hemingway
