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.

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.

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

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!

To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

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.

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.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

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

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.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

Write drunk; edit sober.

Worry destroys the ability to write.

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.

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

The best writing is certainly when you are in love

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

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

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

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.

i believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. then you write for who you love whether they can read or write or not and whether they are alive or dead.

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.

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.

You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

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.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

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?

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).

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

There is no rule on how to write.

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. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

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...

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.

Write hard and clear about what hurts.

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.

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

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.

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

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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