Quotes & Sayings About Hemingway's Writing

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink. — Ernest Hemingway,

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing! — Ernest Hemingway,

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

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,

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important. — Aleksandar Hemon

Writing is a hard business, but nothing makes you feel better — Ernest Hemingway,

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing. — Ernest Hemingway,

After he and this girl split up in Paris, Roger was on the town; really on the town. He joked about it and made fun of himself; but he was very angry inside for having made such a profound fool of himself and he took his talent for being faithful to people, which was the best one he had, next to the ones for painting and writing and his various good human and animal traits, and beat and belaboured that talent miserably. He was no good to anyone when he was on the town, especially to himself, and he knew it and hated it and he took pleasure in pulling down the pillars of the temple. It was a very good and strongly built temple and when it is constructed inside yourself it is not so easy to pull down. But he did as good a job as he could. — Ernest Hemingway,

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. — Ernest Hemingway,

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.

The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

Hemingway was very sparse in his writing. Kris Kristofferson is like that. He can take four words and say it all. — Todd Snider

There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide. — Ernest Hemingway,

And so with Hemingway's writing, he famously wrote to one of his publishers - he said, you don't need a high school education to enjoy my writing. And it's going to titillate the masses. I mean, anybody can relate to it, but the style is so revolutionary that it will titillate highbrow critics, which it did. — Lesley M.M. Blume

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,

Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't. — Ernest Hemingway,

You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through. — Paula McLain

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,

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,

I always shot scorpions with the .22 pistol. — Ernest Hemingway,

... 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,

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,

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

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. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. — Ernest Hemingway,

Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

The only kind of writing is rewriting. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

Hemingway, whenever he was stuck in his writing, would tell himself to write one true thing. A true sentence. Then, he would write another. And another. It — Kamal Ravikant

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary — Pat Conroy

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,

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male. — Robert Silverberg

I even read aloud the part of the novel I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.
When they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has, I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

I consider it a shame that most contemporary American writing seems informed more by Hemingway, the hero of adolescent boys of all ages and genders, than by the sui generis genius of letters, Faulkner. A phalanx of books about boredom in the Midwest is lauded (where the Midwest lies is a source of constant puzzlement to me, somewhere near Iowa, I presume), as are books about unexplored angst in New Jersey or couples unable to communicate in Connecticut. It was Camus who asserted that American novelists are the only ones who think they need not be intellectuals. — Rabih Alameddine

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,

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. — Ernest Hemingway,

To be successful in writing, use short sentences. — Ernest Hemingway,

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already. — Jude Law

Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works. — Ernest Hemingway,

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence. — Ernest Hemingway,

Hemingway once said "all first drafts are shit". At this point we're just writing for the trash can so don't be too judgmental, just get it out there and onto the screen. — Dan Howe

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better. — Ernest Hemingway,

Like many writers, Hemingway thought of his craft as a trade that he was continually learning and at the mercy of. He told his son Gregory of his own try at writing, "Writing's got to flow and come easy if it's good and this stuff 'smells of the lamp.' You know that old phrase - smells like you've been up all night working on it over a kerosene lamp" (James, — Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. — Ernest Hemingway,

Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails. — Lesley M.M. Blume

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

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

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,

Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed-and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage. — Haruki Murakami

To whatever extent the Hell's Angels may or may be latent sadomasochists or repressed homosexuals is to me
after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists
almost entirely irrelevant. There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won't change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors ... but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best. — Hunter S. Thompson

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,

Bad writing is better than never writing. Bad writing can be improved, but if you never write, you'll never improve. — Caroline Hemingway

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

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. — Ernest Hemingway,

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his. — Ernest Hemingway,

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of fish, and how we filleted them and the left the guts out for bears and eagles, and how those fish tasted fresh when we fried them over a fire. — Daniel J. Rice

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,

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,

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,

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,

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,

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

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
(Interview with Paris Review, 1958) — Ernest Hemingway,

If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

I would say just start writing. You've got to write every day. Copy someone that you like if you think that perhaps could become your sound, too. I did that with Hemingway, and I thought I was writing just like Hemingway. Then all of a sudden it occurred to me - he didn't have a sense of humor. I don't know anything he's written that's funny. — Elmore Leonard

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. — Ernest Hemingway,

I like simple writing. I'd rather read Hemingway than Burroughs. — Yannis Philippakis

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,

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

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,

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway. — Joyce Carol Oates

In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. — Ernest Hemingway,

The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Everything good he had ever written he'd made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn't understand. They thought it was all experience. Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he had never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that. — Ernest Hemingway,

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she's gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad. — Ernest Hemingway,

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply? — Ernest Hemingway,

Are you planning to go into writing as a career?'
'Yes, yes, that's what this is all about for me. I'm planning to write another short story this weekend. Have you read Hemingway by the way?'
'Oh yes. Part of growing up.'
'A bit like that, yes. Straight to the point. Simple and clear. With weight behind it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing. — Tim Cahill

At night, never go to bed without knowing what you'll write tomorrow. — Ernest Hemingway,

Remember to get the weather in your damn book
weather is very important. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. — Ernest Hemingway,

Write as well as you can and finish what you start. — Ernest Hemingway,

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. — Marge Piercy

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,

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when you had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris. — Ernest Hemingway,

There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing ... It's a Gap application.' — Marc Maron