Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.

Who ne'er knew joy but friendship might divide,Or gave his father grief but when he died.

I opened up to you and you judge me

I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

I feel as if when you love a book it becomes a part of you whether you have it on your shelves or not.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be on your track like a bloodhound until they are returned.

And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook. In the last two years of his life, when he was sick, he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me… There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him, and trade all those years for one hug. But too late. But that's when I take out his letters and I read them, and the paper that touched his hand is in mine, and I feel connected to him.

See, when you lie to me it hurts," Rixon said, swiping an imaginary tear. "I thought we had something special. I thought our joint eternal sentences of damnation were our bond.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

If [my son] had any pain in feeling that he couldn't express to me, that would hurt.

Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

My love for you was bulletproof but you're the one who shot me.