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“Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what will he bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“I know that when I near my end, I will not reminisce about my dull days. Instead, I’ll relive my days of debauchery, my “moveable feasts,” to coin Hemingway. But it’s not over yet. I’ll be making memories until I die. And that is my advice to you. Make extraordinary memories. Be extra, my friend. Splurge on extra nice things.”
― Art Rios, Let's Talk: ...About Making Your Life Exciting, Easier, And Exceptional

“write hard & clear about what hurts.”
― Earnest Hemingway

“I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“اين داستانها متقاضی ندارند، ولی روزی آنها را خواهند فهمید؛ همان طور که برای نقاشیها هم این اتفاق می‌افتد. فقط به زمان احتیاج است و اعتماد به نفس...”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“He bowed at the dark, straightened, tossed his hat over his shoulder, and, carrying the muleta in his left hand and the sword in his right, walked out toward the bull.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“You're remembering well today,' she said. 'Don't do it too much.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“It's this way, see--when a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn't get any;then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and finally, if the writer's any good, he doesn't get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Nobody likes to life anchors.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“They are not sorrows, so much as terrible things.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most of the soldiers had been men as young as he himself had been. Italians fallen after the Austrian offensive of 1918. You do not forget such sights. You do not un-see such sights. He himself had been wounded, but he had not died. The distinction was profound. Between what lived and what died the distinction was profound. Yet it remained mysterious, elusive. You did not wish to speak of it. Especially you did not wish to pray about it, to beg God to spare you. For it disgusted him to think of God. It disgusted him to think of prayers to such a god. Fumbling his big, bare toe against the trigger of the shotgun he was damned if he would think, in his last quivering moment of his life, of God.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

“So we call upon the author to explain
(Doop doop doop doop dooop)
Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)
He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon
Well, he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain
(Doop doop doop doop dooop)
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain
(Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease
Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix
Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!”
― Nick Cave

“There was a trout.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”
― Ernest Hemingway