“I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of.”

A humorous acknowledgement of the Bible's enormous influence on literary titles · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 15 September 1927

• Books
• Influence
• Literature

“Grace under pressure.”

His celebrated shorthand for courage expressed through composure in adversity · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 20 April 1926

• Character
• Courage
• Strength

“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.”

Defending the language of The Sun Also Rises with typically mischievous understatement · Letter, 21 August 1926

• Humour
• Language
• Writing

“I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”

Joking about letter-writing as respectable procrastination · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1 July 1925

• Humour
• Work
• Writing

“I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists.”

Teasing Fitzgerald through a characteristically irreverent vision of paradise · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1 July 1925

• Belief
• Humour
• Wit

“God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.”

An unusually fierce expression of his distrust of professional literary criticism · Letter to Sherwood Anderson, 23 May 1925

• Criticism
• Independence
• Literature

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible.”

Arguing that originality should come from the writing rather than typographical novelty · Letter, 15 May 1925

• Convention
• Style
• Writing

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”

Linking convincing humour with hardship and accumulated experience · Letter, 6 December 1924

• Experience
• Humour
• Writing

“Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”

Comparing the privacy required for fishing with that required for intimate communication · Article, Trout Fishing in Europe, 1923

• Communication
• Humour
• Privacy

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways.”

A compact example of Hemingway's dry observational humour · Article, The Toronto Star Weekly, 4 March 1922

• Humour
• Travel
• Writing

“And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light”

A youthful reflection on mortality written while recovering from wartime wounds · Letter to his family, 18 October 1918

• Death
• Mortality
• Youth

“Learning is a hell of a lot of fun. Don't see why can't keep it up all my life. Certainly plenty to learn.”

Expressing an enduring appetite for reading, study and intellectual growth · Letter to Malcolm Cowley, 14 November 1945

• Growth
• Knowledge
• Learning

“Listen. If you die you're dead. And if you can write some more good stories you'll never die.”

Contrasting physical mortality with the endurance that worthwhile writing can achieve · Letter to Joseph Hopkins, 1936

• Eternity
• Mortality
• Writing

“The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry.”

Arguing that poetry proved unusually capable of preserving truthful testimony during the First World War · Introduction, Men at War, 1942

• Poetry
• Truth
• War

“Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.”

Offering consolation after bereavement through the persistence of love and memory · Letter to Sara and Gerald Murphy, 19 March 1935

• Consolation
• Grief
• Love

“When you make a living writing it is hard to write letters.”

A dry observation on how professional writing can leave little appetite for writing anything else · Letter to C. E. Hemingway, 26 March 1923

• Communication
• Work
• Writing

“Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.”

Linking literary achievement with judgement, detachment and the endurance needed to finish one's work · Non-fiction, Green Hills of Africa

• Character
• Perseverance
• Writing

“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

The memorable image behind his theory that much of a story's meaning can remain unstated · Non-fiction, Death in the Afternoon

• Imagery
• Simplicity
• Writing

“I rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Getting the words right.”

A characteristically concise statement of his commitment to revision and precision · Interview, The Paris Review, 1958

• Discipline
• Style
• Writing

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.”

Describing serious writing as a continual attempt to exceed one's previous achievement · Nobel Prize banquet speech, 1954

• Creativity
• Perseverance
• Writing

“Indeed, the Negro novel is one of the great potentialities of American literature.”

Expressing confidence in the future importance of Black American fiction · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

• Culture
• Hope
• Literature

“Negro poetic expression hovers for the moment, pardonably perhaps, over the race problem, but its highest allegiance is to Poetry—it must soar.”

Arguing that poetry can arise from social struggle while aspiring beyond immediate circumstance · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

• Freedom
• Poetry
• Struggle

“With each new figure somehow the gamut broadens and the technical control improves.”

Seeing literary development as both an expansion of range and an increase in craftsmanship · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

• Growth
• Poetry
• Skill

“Here a new literary generation begins; poetry that is racial in substance, but with the universal note, with the conscious background of the full heritage of English poetry.”

Describing a generation joining particular cultural experience with universal poetic expression · Essay, The Negro in American Literature

• Identity
• Poetry
• Tradition