Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. At the height of his popularity, this 1954 Nobel laureate was acknowledged as the greatest literary stylists of the 20th century.
Hemmingway’s life and literary career were contentious from the outset. The Hemingway machismo persona included hard-drinking, a confrontational disposition, and a penchant for bullfights, prizefights, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, Hemingway’s father, a doctor, introduced him to the rituals of hunting and fishing. His mother was religious and musical. Much of Hemingway’s later creativity was inspired by reminiscences of vacation trips to northern Michigan, the setting of some of his finest stories.
After serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, Hemingway became a journalist in Paris, where he came into contact with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and other writers. He later served as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
Hemingway’s principal literary theme is war—as a personal and symbolic experience, moral condition, and a steady state of human spirit. His notable works include The Sun Also Rises (1926,) A Farewell to Arms (1929,) For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940,) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952, Pulitzer Prize 1953.) His collections of stories include Men without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933.)
During his life, Hemingway was a celebrity whose every move was reported in the newspapers and magazines of his day. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Idaho’s Sun Valley, word of his death made front-page news around the world. A number of his significant works, including A Moveable Feast (1964,) The Nick Adams Stories (1972,) and The Dangerous Summer (1985,) were published after his death.
Most of Hemingway’s novels, and many of his short stories, have been made into feature films. He has inspired numerous full-length biographies, countless personal remembrances by family and friends, and many books of criticism.
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But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
—Ernest Hemingway
I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write and then I remember that it was always difficult and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Perseverance, Endurance, Resolve
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
—Ernest Hemingway
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 the afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and places and how the weather was.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading
Life breaks us all, but afterwards, many of us are strongest at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Morality, Morals
Never mistake motion for action.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Mistakes, Action
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Doubt, Uncertainty
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Simplicity, Morality, Simple Living, Morals
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.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: War
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
—Ernest Hemingway
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.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Books, Literature
All thinking men are atheists.
—Ernest Hemingway
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Fear, Anxiety, Courage, Cowardice
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
—Ernest Hemingway
I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
—Ernest Hemingway
You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
—Ernest Hemingway
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.
—Ernest Hemingway
They can’t yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
—Ernest Hemingway
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
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