“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Variant: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Ernest Hemingway: Doing
Ernest Hemingway was American author and journalist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Ernest Hemingway:
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“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!”
From a set of "rules for life" sent to publisher Charles Scribner IV; quoted in Scribner's memoir In the Company of Writers (New York: Scribner, 1991), p. 64 https://books.google.com/books?id=yYdHGtlgIsYC&pg=PA64&dq=hemingway+%22rules+for+life%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-zvyfgNDMAhUJ_mMKHU6zDrYQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=%20%22rules%20for%20life%22&f=false
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: 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 you know."
“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
Source: The Old Man and the Sea
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Letter (15 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Part IV, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
Source: A Moveable Feast
“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
Source: A Farewell to Arms
“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929)
“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
A Letter from Cuba (1934)
Context: 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's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you.”
As quoted in "Portrait of Mr. Papa" by Malcolm Cowley in LIFE magazine (10 January 1949)
Context: It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.
Letter to Bernard Berenson (24 September 1954); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Context: 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.
Letter (21 February 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Context: 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 F. B. I.-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.