“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
More from Ernest Hemingway on Writing
“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
“Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.”
“What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”
“Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.”
“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”
“Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.”
“What you don't write is often more important than what you do”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
Others on Writing
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
Madeleine L'Engle
6 quotes“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”