“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
More from Ernest Hemingway on Writing
“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.”
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
“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
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Milan Kundera
6 quotes“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
Vladimir Nabokov
6 quotes“The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview,...”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”