Ernest Hemingway: Writing
Ernest Hemingway was American author and journalist. Explore interesting quotes on writing.“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.
“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."
On the loss of a suitcase containing work from his first two years as a writer, as quoted in With Hemingway (1984) by Arnold Samuelson
“But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: 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.
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.
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.
Nobel Prize Speech (1954)
Context: 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. 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. 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.
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2