Ernest Hemingway

Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

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

A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

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

One cat just leads to another."[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things,

I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

I wonder. Of course maybe that isn't what they figure to do. Maybe they aren't going to do any such thing. But it's natural that's what they would do and I heard that word.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Then I started to think in Lipp__ about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d__mpezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called __ut of Season_ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

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

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

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.

Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.