Ernest Hemingway Books & Quotes - Nobel Prize Series

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman.

Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

His 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).

His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations.

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954 was awarded to Ernest Miller Hemingway “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

“.. his narrative skill often attains its highest point when cast in a smaller mould, in the laconic, drastically pruned short story, which, with a unique combination of simplicity and precision, nails its theme into our consciousness so that every blow tells.
Such a masterpiece, more than any other, is The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the unforgettable story of an old Cuban fisherman’s duel with a huge swordfish in the Atlantic. Within the frame of a sporting tale, a moving perspective of man’s destiny is opened up; the story is a tribute to the fighting spirit, which does not give in even if the material gain is nil, a tribute to the moral victory in the midst of defeat.”
…
he also possesses a heroic pathos which forms the basic element in his awareness of life, a manly love of danger and adventure with a natural admiration for every individual who fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death. In any event, this is the positive side of his cult of manliness, which otherwise is apt to become demonstrative, thereby defeating its own ends. It should be remembered, however, that courage is Hemingway’s central theme – the bearing of one who is put to the test and who steels himself to meet the cold cruelty of existence, without, by so doing, repudiating the great and generous moments.
Presentation Speech | The Nobel Prize Award ceremony 1954

Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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.

The Old Man and the Sea Quotes

“Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” Let us hope so, he thought.
The Old Man and the Sea

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
The Old Man and the Sea

“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
The Old Man and the Sea

The Sun Also Rises Quotes

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.
The Sun Also Rises

I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money.
The Sun Also Rises

For Whom the Bells Toll Quotes

But your plan stinks. It stinks, I tell you. It was a night plan and it’s morning now. Night plans aren’t any good in the morning. The way you think at night is no good in the morning. So now you know it is no good.
For Whom the Bell Tolls

So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.
For Whom The Bell Tolls

But an army that is made up of good and bad elements cannot win a war. All must be brought to a certain level of political development; all must know why they are fighting, and its importance. All must believe in the fight they are to make and all must accept discipline.
For Whom The Bell Tolls

“I speak to you as though I knew you for a long time.” “It is like that,” Robert Jordan said, “when people understand one another.”
For Whom The Bell Tolls

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
For Whom The Bell Tolls

He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think about and he must think it out clearly and take everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult.
For Whom The Bell Tolls

They were walking now close together in the dark and he spoke softly, sometimes turning his head as he climbed. “I would not kill even a Bishop. I would not kill a proprietor of any kind. I would make them work each day as we have worked in the fields and as we work in the mountains with the timber, all of the rest of their lives. So they would see what man is born to. That they should sleep where we sleep. That they should eat as we eat. But above all that they should work. Thus they would learn.” “And they would survive to enslave thee again.” “To kill them teaches nothing,” Anselmo said. “You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred. That all our enemies should learn.”
For Whom The Bell Tolls

A Farewell to Arms Quotes

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
A Farewell to Arms

But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.
A Farewell to Arms

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
A Farewell to Arms

Hemingway Quotes on Writing

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Write hard and clear about what hurts.

The first draft of anything is shit.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Write drunk, edit sober.

I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers.

As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

Always stop writing when you know what’s going to happen next.

You throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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.
A Moveable Feast

In order to write about life first you must live it.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Hemingway Quotes on Human Qualities

Courage is grace under pressure.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
Men Without Women

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

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.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.