Ernest Hemingway

“I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful.”

“Never confuse movement with action.”

“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.”

“You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.”

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”

“Here's the beautiful lady with the beer.”

“You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.”

“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”

“All thinking men are atheists.”

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.”

“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 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.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

“You wouldn't believe it. It's like a wonderful nightmare.""Sure," I said. "I'd believe anything. Including nightmares." "What's the matter? Feel low?""Low as hell.”

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”