Hemingway Writing Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Hemingway Writing. Here they are! All 100 of them:

β€œ
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
The first draft of anything is shit.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation β€” the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.
”
”
Peter De Vries (Reuben, Reuben)
β€œ
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Write hard and clear about what hurts.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
In order to write about life first you must live it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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
β€œ
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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
β€œ
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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
β€œ
Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Good writing is good conversation, only more so.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Write drunk; edit sober.
”
”
Peter De Vries (Reuben, Reuben)
β€œ
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
The only kind of writing is rewriting.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books. And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum. No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay.
”
”
Matthew Quick (The Silver Linings Playbook)
β€œ
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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
β€œ
Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (On Writing)
β€œ
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
I had learned already 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 (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
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
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
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
β€œ
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.
”
”
Tiffany Madison
β€œ
I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
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 (The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Scribner Classics))
β€œ
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
β€œ
Beasts bounding through time. Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly
”
”
Charles Bukowski (You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (My Losing Season: A Memoir)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down a a typewriter and bleed. E. Hemmingway We don't write to be understood, we write to understand......... Love yourself. Dare to dream. Live on purpose!
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
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
β€œ
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 (Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity)
β€œ
I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.
”
”
Iain S. Thomas
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (The Snows Of Kilimanjaro: Short Story)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.
”
”
Elmore Leonard
β€œ
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 (On Writing)
β€œ
Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway's the Old Man and the Sea (Monarch Notes: A Guide to Understanding the World's Great Writing))
β€œ
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Ψ¨ΨΉΨ― Ψ§Ω„Ψ§Ω†ΨͺΩ‡Ψ§Ψ‘ Ω…Ω† ΩƒΨͺΨ§Ψ¨ Ψ£Ψ΄ΨΉΨ± Ψ¨Ψ£Ω†Ω†ΩŠ Ω…Ψ³Ψͺنزف ΨΉΨ§Ψ·ΩΩŠΨ§Ω‹. Ψ₯Ψ°Ψ§ Ω„Ω… يحدث Ω…ΨΉΩƒ Ψ°Ω„ΩƒΨŒ Ω„Ω† ΨͺΨͺΩ…ΩƒΩ† Ω…Ω† Ω†Ω‚Ω„ Ψ§Ω„Ω…Ψ΄Ψ§ΨΉΨ± Ω„Ω‚Ψ§Ψ±Ψ¦Ωƒ.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (On Writing)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
”
”
Joyce Carol Oates (Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway)
β€œ
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 you know.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
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 (The Garden of Eden)
β€œ
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
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
β€œ
Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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. 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 (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
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 (On Writing)
β€œ
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β€œ
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 (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
β€œ
I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
β€œ
One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, β€œWhen you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!
”
”
Roald Dahl
β€œ
To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled β€œSaunders Mountain.” β€œHmm,” I thought. β€œIt’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.” Then again, that was my name on it. This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, tooβ€”it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours. What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.
”
”
George Saunders (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life)
β€œ
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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
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
β€œ
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 ice-berg 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. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; 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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
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 (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. 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 ice-berg 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. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; 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.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)
β€œ
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 (A Moveable Feast)
β€œ
If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the MusΓ©e du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the CΓ©zannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of CΓ©zanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
β€œ
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. 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. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway
β€œ
Sometimes during the night I'd look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no family, no nothing, just myself the stupid son of plans all of them compacted of eventual darkness. God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life - and to think that negative little paper-shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that! ... No remedy but in my mind I raise a fist to High Heaven promising that I shall bull whip the first bastard who makes fun of human hopelessness anyway - I know it's ridiculous to pray to my father that hunk of dung in a grave yet I pray to him anyway, what else shall I do? sneer? shuffle paper on a desk and burp rationality? Ah thank God for all the Rationalists the worms and vermin got. Thank God for all the hate mongering political pamphleteers with no left or right to yell about in the Grave of Space. I say that we shall all be reborn with the Only One, and that's what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, don't deny her that, that's her way of stating the fact. If there can't be love among men let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate so am I. Thefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate American between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the hematodes that hang parasitically from dreary southern trees, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath - Who are men, that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking 'What is there to laugh about in that?' 'How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?' 'Who makes fun of misery?' There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didn't ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didn't ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads - Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness, forever?
”
”
Jack Kerouac (Desolation Angels)
β€œ
Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons Γ‘ la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.
”
”
Robert Graves