Top 66 Hemingway On Writing Quotes
#1. After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.
Clive Owen
#2. I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#3. It is why I bother with you," he said. "I think you write absolutely truly and that is very rare. So I would like you to know some things.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. Having an attack of self-doubt about your writing ability?
Step #1 - Tell yourself - 'I'm the best damn writer there is, and the world deserves to hear my voice.'
Step #2 - Repeat Step #1 until you believe it.
Jonathan Maas
#5. But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.
Naomi Wood
#6. I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
Ernest Hemingway,
#10. Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
Ernest Hemingway,
#12. There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. [Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.
William T. Vollmann
#14. Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Charles Bukowski
#16. I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.
Elmore Leonard
#17. Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.
Ernest Hemingway,
#19. A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. 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 it again.
Ernest Hemingway,
#21. People have invoked the ghost of Hemingway quite a few times in writing about the book. I could get into sticky territory here if I let myself go on about this subject. The more I hear it, the more it rankles, frankly.
Ron Currie Jr.
#22. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
Ernest Hemingway,
#23. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
Ernest Hemingway,
#24. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
Ernest Hemingway,
#25. He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.
A. E. Hotchner
#26. Tell him I think writing is lousy," Bill said. "Go on, tell him. Tell him I'm ashamed of being a writer.
Ernest Hemingway,
#27. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway,
#29. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#31. I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world
or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)
Ernest Hemingway,
#32. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#33. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.
Dave Barry
#37. Hemingway is my favourite writer, I'm just not the hugest fan of his writing.
Atticus
#38. ... Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done - so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Ernest Hemingway,
#41. For me, all writing
storytelling and style
gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.
Dennis R. Miller
#42. I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
Ernest Hemingway,
#43. There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#44. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.
Mordecai Richler
#45. If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#48. My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.
Ernest Hemingway,
#51. Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation - the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.
Peter De Vries
#52. I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
Ernest Hemingway,
#53. 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 ...
Ernest Hemingway,
#54. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#55. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
Ernest Hemingway,
#56. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.
Ernest Hemingway,
#58. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#59. Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.
Ernest Hemingway,
#61. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway,
#62. 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. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#63. I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#64. Those who say they want to be writers, and aren't writing, don't.
Ernest Hemingway,
#65. Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#66. Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.
Ernest Hemingway,
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