Ernest Hemingway

"A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists."

"A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."

"I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]"

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

"A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it."

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

"You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his."

"Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline."

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

"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."

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket."

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

"When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through."

"What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done."

"Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave."

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."

"Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he sees you as ugly as you really are and he is not blind anymore and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling..."

"We are all broken, that's how the light gets in."

"All things truly wicked start from innocence."