Ernest Hemingway

"They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooters two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness."

"To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic."

"Ive been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division."

"A mans got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."

"In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more."

"That terrible mood of depression of whether its any good or not is what is known as The Artists Reward."

"Ive tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that Im afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred."

"When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first."

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

"God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They wont even whore. Theyre all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But theyre all camp-followers."

"Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or dont you like to write letters. I do because its such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel youve done something"

"The age demanded that we dance And jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit that it demanded."