Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
– Ernest Hemingway
Tag: Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 345
It is hard enough to write books and stories without having to explain them as well.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 251
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.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 205
Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 145
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 138
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and blasting it out with charges.
– Ernest Hemingway
Quotable 75
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
– Ernest Hemingway
Pen to Paper: Writers and Alcohol
Let me be clear at the outset that I have no hatchet to grind, let alone to smash a tavern with. I am a teetotaler but strictly from medical necessity (it’s a migraine trigger) rather than preference (how do you think I learned it’s a migraine trigger?).
No, this entry comes about because I have collected some interesting quotations about writers and drinking. I think they would look a bit peculiar in the Wednesday Quotation spot bereft of larger context, so I decided to provide the context, and the quotations, here.
Quotable 27
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
– Ernest Hemingway