Ernest Hemingway Writing Quotations

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

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

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

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.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

The ocean is worth writing about just as man is.

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.

Having books published is very destructive to writing.

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.

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.

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.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

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.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

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.

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.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.

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.)

Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective

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.

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.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

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.

I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you

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

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.

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.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader

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.

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

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.

Live it up so you can write it down.

All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

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.

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.

Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

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.

I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

It is a miserable thing to have people writing about your private life while you are alive. I have tried to stop it all that I could but there have been many abuses by people I trusted. You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.

There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

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.

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.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

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.

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

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

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.

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

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

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

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

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.

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

Write as well as you can and finish what you start.

The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. 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.

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.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

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

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

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

The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.

You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.

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.

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.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... 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.

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

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.