Favorite Hemingway quotes.

• "I had learned already 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."
• "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
• "There is no friend as loyal as a book."
• "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
• "I drink to make other people more interesting."
• "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."
• "The first draft of anything is shit."
• "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
• "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."
• "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
• "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
• "A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."
• "You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason."
• "When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous."
• "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
• "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."
• "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
• "Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love."
• "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"
• "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."
• "No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."
• "Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is."
• "Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet."
• "When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."
• "I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
• "By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."
• "You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."
• "But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."
• "If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed."
• "Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important."
• "There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span."
• "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact."
• "Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar."
• "You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."
• "In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken."