Top 100 Quotes About Hemingway's Writing
#1. Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails.
Lesley M.M. Blume
#2. In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.
Ernest Hemingway,
#3. If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
William Faulkner
#4. Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
Ernest Hemingway,
#5. 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
#7. 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,
#8. Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.
Ernest Hemingway,
#9. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
Ernest Hemingway,
#10. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.
Ernest Hemingway,
#11. Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.
Ernest Hemingway,
#12. Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
Ernest Hemingway,
#14. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
Ernest Hemingway,
#15. I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know. I'm always writing little lines and saving them for later.
Imelda May
#16. When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway,
#17. 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.
#18. Ernest Hemingway talked about how writing is opening up a vein and bleeding onto the page. You prepared to do that?
Craig Lancaster
#19. I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.
Stephen King
#21. I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.
Tiffany Madison
#22. Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.
Ernest Hemingway,
#23. 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,
#25. 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,
#26. 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,
#27. Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#29. You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'Write how you are but make it straight.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.
Hugh MacLeod
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#33. I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
Ernest Hemingway,
#34. Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river.
Naomi Wood
#38. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.
Ernest Hemingway,
#39. A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. 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,
#41. Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#42. My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#43. Tell him I think writing is lousy," Bill said. "Go on, tell him. Tell him I'm ashamed of being a writer.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
Ernest Hemingway,
#47. One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.
Alessandra Stanley
#49. It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
Ernest Hemingway,
#51. You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway,
#52. 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,
#54. 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,
#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. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#57. 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,
#58. I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
Ernest Hemingway,
#59. There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#60. There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
Ernest Hemingway,
#61. 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
#62. Hemingway is my favourite writer, I'm just not the hugest fan of his writing.
Atticus
#63. ... 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,
#65. 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,
#66. For me, all writing
storytelling and style
gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.
Dennis R. Miller
#67. 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,
#69. 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
#70. 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,
#71. 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,
#73. My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#75. Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.
Ernest Hemingway,
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.
Naomi Wood
#80. I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
Ernest Hemingway,
#82. Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
Ernest Hemingway,
#84. 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
#86. There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide.
Ernest Hemingway,
#87. [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
#88. 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
#89. 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,
#90. 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
#91. Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#94. 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,
#95. Those who say they want to be writers, and aren't writing, don't.
Ernest Hemingway,
#96. 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,
#97. 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,
#98. 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,
#100. 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,
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