Originally published 2019-02-01.
Many of the most-shared "Ernest Hemingway quotes" are not his. Some come straight from his novels and essays, some were reported by people who knew him, and several were written by someone else entirely and attached to his name decades later. Below are fifteen lines that often appear in Hemingway collections, sorted by how confident we can be that he actually wrote or said them.
The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society has warned that misattributed quotes spread mainly through sites like Goodreads, BrainyQuote, Quotefancy, iHeartIntelligence and Pinterest. That is a good reason to check before you print a line on a mug.
Why Hemingway gets so many quotes
Hemingway (1899–1961) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. His style was famously spare: short declarative sentences, plain words and emotion left beneath the surface. That style is easy to imitate, and a short, punchy sentence "sounds like Hemingway" even when it is not.
There is a second problem. In the 1960s Playboy bought a set of supposed Hemingway sayings from a group that claimed to have collected them in late-1950s interviews, and scholars have treated that material with suspicion. Add his reputation as a drinker and adventurer, and any witty line about whisky or courage tends to drift toward his name.
Lines from his own books and essays
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."
This is genuine. It comes from A Farewell to Arms (1929), narrated by Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in the Italian army during the First World War. The full passage is much darker than the poster version: it goes on to say that the world kills those it cannot break. Read in context, it is a reflection on war, not a cheerful slogan about resilience.
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
Also genuine. It appears in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, published after his death in 1964. He describes using the idea to get unstuck when a story would not start, which makes it one of the most practical pieces of writing advice he left.
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened…"
This is the opening of a longer passage from "Old Newsman Writes," a letter-essay Hemingway published in Esquire in December 1934. The rest describes how a good book leaves the reader owning its people, places and even the weather, and ends by saying that a writer is someone who can give that to readers.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
This line is usually traced to The Garden of Eden, the novel published in 1986, long after his death, from an unfinished manuscript. It is spoken in a novel full of unhappy, clever people, so it is better read as character than as Hemingway's personal creed.
The long romantic exchange often included in these lists, which ends with one character saying she wants to "ruin" the other, is also fiction: a piece of dialogue between two lovers. Shared as a standalone quote it sounds like advice about love; in a novel it is a portrait of an intense and rather destructive relationship.
Reported sayings and letters
"The first draft of anything is shit."
This comes not from Hemingway's own writing but from Arnold Samuelson, a young man who spent a year with him in Key West and Cuba in the 1930s and later wrote a memoir about it. It is a second-hand report, so treat the wording as approximate, but it fits everything Hemingway said elsewhere about rewriting. He claimed to have rewritten the ending of A Farewell to Arms dozens of times.
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
This is usually traced to a 1955 letter, which would make it authentic but private, a remark to a friend rather than a public pronouncement. Collections almost never cite the letter, so the safest label is "attributed."
Lines he almost certainly did not say
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
The Hemingway Society itself used this quote on its homepage and later corrected the record: it cannot be documented as something he said or wrote. Similar wording appeared in the 1940s, connected with sportswriter Red Smith and with Paul Gallico, and the Hemingway attribution shows up only years after his death.
"I drink to make other people more interesting."
The earliest known version was printed by critic George Jean Nathan in The Smart Set in April 1923, credited to an unnamed friend. There is no evidence that the friend was Hemingway, who was then an unknown young writer in Paris.
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
This idea circulated in moral and self-improvement writing before Hemingway was well known, and no Hemingway book or letter has been found containing it. It is a fine thought; it simply belongs to someone else.
Several other lines in popular lists have no known source in his work: the remark that there is no friend as loyal as a book, the advice to listen completely when people talk, the confession about loving sleep because life falls apart when awake, the warning about losing yourself by loving someone too much, and the joke about doing sober what you promised drunk. Their modern tone is a clue. Until someone finds them in a book, letter or reliable interview, they should be labelled "often attributed to Hemingway."
How to check a Hemingway quote yourself
- Look for a title and year. A real quote can usually be tied to a novel, story, article or letter. "Ernest Hemingway" with no work named is a warning sign.
- Check the Hemingway Society. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society publishes notes on disputed quotations.
- Search quotation researchers. Sites such as Quote Investigator and Barry Popik's archive trace sayings back to their earliest printed appearance.
- Watch for fiction. Even a genuine line may belong to a character, so "Hemingway believed" is not the same as "a Hemingway character says."
What his real writing offers
The genuine lines share something the invented ones lack: they come attached to a scene, a war, a city or a working method. The broken places in A Farewell to Arms belong to a soldier who has seen too much. The one true sentence in A Moveable Feast belongs to a struggling writer in a cold Paris room. That context is what gives them weight.
If these quotes have made you curious, the books are the better place to start. A Moveable Feast is short and full of his thinking about writing, and The Old Man and the Sea shows his style at its most concentrated.
Sources: Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society: Hemingway Didn't Say That; Hemingway Society: Quotation Controversy, Writing and Bleeding; Barry Popik: "I drink to make other people interesting". Quote collection first compiled by I Heart Intelligence.
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