Ernest Hemingway

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.

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.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

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.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by 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.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story., 1958)

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Man is not made for defeat.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.