Ernest Hemingway Quotes About Writing
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For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
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Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your nerves.
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My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
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I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
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The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
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You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.
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The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
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Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.
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The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
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I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
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I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.
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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. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
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Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.
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If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
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All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
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You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
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Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
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The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.
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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again.
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Live it up so you can write it down.
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
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All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.
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To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.
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Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
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Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
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Easy writing makes hard reading.
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In order to write about life first you must live it.
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You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.
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