Quotes & Sayings About Writing Ernest Hemingway

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,

When asked about rewriting, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that spontaneous eloquence seemed like a miracle and that he rewrote every word he ever published, and often several times. And Mark Strand, former poet laureate, says that each of his poems sometimes goes through forty to fifty drafts before it is finished. — Susan M. Tiberghien

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,

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

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket. — Ernest Hemingway,

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars. — 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,

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,

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,

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

[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

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,

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,

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,

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on. — 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,

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,

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,

Don't you believe I love you? Don't know how I can make you believe. I didn't want to kiss you goodbye
that was the trouble
I wanted to kiss you goodnight. [ ... ] Of course I love you. I love you all the time. [ ... ] I'd like to hold you and kiss you so that you wouldn't doubt whether I wanted to or not. — 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,

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is no rule on how to write. — Ernest Hemingway,

Writing is easy...all you have to do is sit at the typewriter and bleed. -- Ernest Hemingway — Dana Wayne

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,

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water — Ernest Hemingway,

I remember all of these things happening and the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year. But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been. Each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end. But finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater pleasure than any I had ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered. — 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,

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it. — Ernest Hemingway,

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers. — Ernest Hemingway,

What you don't write is often more important than what you do — Ernest Hemingway,

In order to write about life first you must live it. — Ernest Hemingway,

Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness. — Ernest Hemingway,

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. — Ernest Hemingway,

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM. — Tiffany Madison

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

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

The further you go in writing the more alone you are. — Ernest Hemingway,

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand. — Ernest Hemingway,

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time). — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing. — 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

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

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

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

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,

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,

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

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,

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,

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,

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 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,

Good writing is good conversation, only more so. — Ernest Hemingway,

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,

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

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

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,

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

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,

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,

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

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,

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,

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