Ernest Hemingway quotes about the craft

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.

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

Hunger is good discipline.

The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

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.

Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. 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.

It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting.

Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett.

Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights.

It was all so slow and so controlled. It was as though he were rocking the bull to sleep.

Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive anything.

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger.

People take a boy like that. They don’t know what he’s worth. They don’t know what he means. Any foreigner can flatter him. They start this Grand Hotel business, and in one year they’re through.