Ernest Hemingway

"The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it."

"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day."

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

"The first draft of anything is shit."

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

"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."

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

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love."

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."

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

"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

"I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred."

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

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

"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."

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."