Quotes About Writing

The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That's all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is?

finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater pleasure than any I had ever known.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.

I write about my now. It is the horses. You have a very interesting now. And you've made me presents of many places and people.

Look, if you can't write why don't you learn to write criticism?

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.

Ernest Hemingway

There was a great deal of material that Hemingway wrote for A Moveable Feast that he decided to leave out, acting "by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

For Whom the Bell Tolls was an immediate success. Hemingway wrote to his first wife, Hadley, that it was "selling like frozen daiquiris in hell."24 It has had tremendous impact and has been

Te he visto, monada, y ya eres mía, por más que esperes a quien quieras y aunque nunca vuelva a verte, pensé. Eres mía y todo París es mío y yo soy de este cuaderno y de este lápiz.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always 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.

Write drunk; edit sober.

When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was. I knew that it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel.

Make it all up. But make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

In the early days writing in Paris I would invent not only from my own experience but from the experiences and knowledge of my friends and all the people I had known, or met since I could remember, who were not writers. I was very lucky always that my best friends were not writers and to have known many intelligent people who were articulate.

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature

Just now, I am very busy on a study of Calvo Sotelo. He was a very good fascist; a true Spanish fascist. Franco and these other people are not. I have been studying all of Sotelo's writing and speeches. He was very intelligent and it was very intelligent that he was killed.

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

I've never read anything, though, that could make you feel about the country the way we feel about it. . . I'd like to try to write something about the country and the animals and what it's like to some one who knows nothing about it.

It is why I bother with you, he said. I think you write absolutely truly and that is very rare. So I would like you to know some things.

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.