Ernest Hemingway

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

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.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

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

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

There is no friend as loyal as a book

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.