Top 100 Quotes About Writing Ernest Hemingway
#1. 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,
#2. 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,
#3. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. 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,
#5. Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.
Ernest Hemingway,
#6. 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,
#7. My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. Tell him I think writing is lousy," Bill said. "Go on, tell him. Tell him I'm ashamed of being a writer.
Ernest Hemingway,
#11. I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#14. 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,
#15. You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway,
#16. 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,
#17. Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
Ernest Hemingway,
#18. 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,
#19. 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,
#20. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
Ernest Hemingway,
#21. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.
Ernest Hemingway,
#22. Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.
Ernest Hemingway,
#23. Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
Ernest Hemingway,
#25. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
Ernest Hemingway,
#29. I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters ... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.
Ernest Hemingway,
#31. Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.
Ernest Hemingway,
#32. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#34. The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. 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
#38. The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
Ernest Hemingway,
#39. 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
#40. I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
Ernest Hemingway,
#41. Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#42. Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
Ernest Hemingway,
#43. 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,
#45. 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,
#47. If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.
Ernest Hemingway,
#48. Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway,
#49. I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. 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,
#51. There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
Ernest Hemingway,
#52. 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,
#53. 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,
#55. 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,
#56. 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,
#58. 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,
#59. 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,
#60. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#61. 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,
#62. I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
Ernest Hemingway,
#63. There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#64. 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,
#65. 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
#66. ... 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,
#68. 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,
#69. 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,
#71. 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,
#72. 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,
#74. My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#77. When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway,
#78. Ernest Hemingway talked about how writing is opening up a vein and bleeding onto the page. You prepared to do that?
Craig Lancaster
#79. 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,
#80. I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.
Tiffany Madison
#81. 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,
#82. 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,
#84. 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,
#85. 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,
#86. 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,
#87. 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,
#88. I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
Ernest Hemingway,
#89. Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.
Ernest Hemingway,
#90. Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide.
Ernest Hemingway,
#94. [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
#96. Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.
Ernest Hemingway,
#98. Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#99. 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,
#100. Those who say they want to be writers, and aren't writing, don't.
Ernest Hemingway,
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