Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway Quotes

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life….For [the writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.…
from Hemingway's message to the Swedish Academy on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1954
I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world-or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.
to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer, 1933, Selected Letters
…whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about.
to Maxwell Perkins, 1928, Selected Letters
The hardest thing in the world 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…
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
Nobody really knows or understands and nobody has ever said the secret. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do…
from Mary Hemingway, How It Was
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 the experience of the person who reads it.
to Bernard Berenson, 1954, Selected Letters
He wanted to write like Cezanne painted….Cezanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing…..He…wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself.
The Nick Adams Stories
You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.
to Dr. C. E. Hemingway, 1925, Selected Letters
Mice: How can a writer train himself?
Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the readers will see it too and have the same feeling that you had….
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things…
Death in the Afternoon
…All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
A Moveable Feast
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
to Maxwell Perkins, 1945, Selected Letters
…After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write.
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
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.
Death in the Afternoon
Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark [sic] are all sharks and no better and no worse…. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
to Bernard Berenson, 1952, Selected Letters
This is the prose that I have been working for all my life [The Old Man and the Sea] that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man's spirit. It is as good prose as I can write as of now.
to Charles Scribner, 1951, Selected Letters
…I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves…. Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless….
to Bernard Berenson, 1954, Selected Letters

The above citations are from quotes of Ernest Hemingway in Ernest Hemingway On Writing Edited by Larry W. Phillips, Copyright 1984 by Larry W. Phillips and Mary Welsh Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York; and in Ernest Hemingway A-Z The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, Copyright 1999 by Charles M. Oliver published by Facts on File, Inc., New York, N.Y.