Ernest Hemingway: Writing

Ernest Hemingway was American author and journalist. Explore interesting quotes on writing.
Ernest Hemingway: 1002 quotes92 likes

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. […] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

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

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

Ernest Hemingway

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.

“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

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

Ernest Hemingway

Paris Review interview (1958)

“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

“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

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

As quoted in Reporting (1964) by Lillian Ross
Source: A Moveable Feast

“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 book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

“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

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
Context: Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or 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

“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 book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

“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

Source: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

“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

“The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

“Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called "Out of Season" and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 8

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Torrents of Spring

Part 1, Ch. 1 (the opening lines of the novel)
The line Yogi Johnson quotes is actually from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. This is one of several misattributed quotes in the novel.
The Torrents of Spring (1926)