Ernest Hemingway

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.

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.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

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.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

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

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

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.

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.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.