Ernest Hemingway: Writing

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

“Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to Bernard Berenson (2 October 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on 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

Preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944)

“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 only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Hemingway's famous iceberg theory of writing.
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16

“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”

Ernest Hemingway

Statement after seeing David O. Selznick's remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957).
Papa Hemingway (1966)

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

"Trout Fishing in Europe" The Toronto Star Weekly (17 November 1923)

“Easy writing makes hard reading.”

Ernest Hemingway

As quoted in Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) by Samuel Putnam, p. 128

“It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Torrents of Spring

Part 2, Ch. 5
Harold Stearns was a once-well-known New York writer and intellectual whom Hemingway knew when they were both living in Paris.
The Torrents of Spring (1926)

“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

“Only three things in my life I've really liked to do - hunt, write and make love.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 2, Ch. 5
Papa Hemingway (1966)

“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

Ernest Hemingway

Nobel Prize Speech (1954)

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler

“You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'
'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
'Write how you are but make it straight.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 10
Islands in the Stream (1970)

“I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

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

“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Papa Hemingway (1966)

“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 similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition”

Ernest Hemingway

the lowest thing I can think of at this time
Letter (20 March 1953); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“[W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.”

Ernest Hemingway

Luis Miguel Dominguin had undergone surgery after being wounded in a bullfight. From the context it is clear that his remark about Hemingway was a joke.
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 10

“Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?… The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”

Ernest Hemingway

Postscript to letter to critic, poet and translator Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i. e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (12 January 1936); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (26 August 1940); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker