Quotes about Books and Writing

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Quotes about Books and Writing

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1SDaisy
Mar 19, 2017, 11:36 pm

This is the place for people to post any quotes they might come across in reference to books, reading, writing, or libraries. I’d love to hear some of your favorites! :-)

The following quotes are from Ernest Hemingway: Man of Courage by Kurt Singer and Jane Sherrod, and are (unless otherwise stated) by Ernest Hemingway, not the authors.

“There is a school of thought in America which, if encouraged far enough, would believe that a man should be punished for the simple error against conformity of being a poet. Dante, by these standards, could well have lived his life in St. Elizabeth’s hospital” (a place for the mentally unstable) “for errors of judgment and pride.”

“This old-fashioned pencil slows a fellow down. You feel like you are drawing a picture with words. And the other end of the pencil is good too; you can erase and polish. Get just the right word.”

“Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job… A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for the refill.”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me or my books… All I am interested in, will I be able to write another book as powerful, as strong, and will it take a long time of laboring to write a book to match this one? Am I a one-book man? Where do I go from here?”

“When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and you warm as you write. You read what you have written, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next. You write until you come to the place where you still have your juice.”

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful…”

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it, then there is a hole in the story… But the knowledge makes the underwater part of the iceberg.”

“The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away. I’m writing it. I’m just as proud as a lion. I use the oldest words in the English language. People think I am an ignorant guy who doesn’t know the ten-dollar words. There are older and better words which if you can arrange them in the proper combination you can make it stick.”

“A writer’s job is to tell the truth. I only know what I have seen. That is the way it was.”

“You ought to always write it, to get it stated. No matter what you do with it.”

“I learned to write by reading the Bible, mostly the Old Testament.”

“I write slowly… and with a great deal of difficulty and my head has to be clear to do it. While I write the stuff, I have to live it in my head.”

In answer to the question what Hemingway considered the best training for a new author, he said: “Let’s say the young writer should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of hanging to commence with.”

Pete Wellington, the editor of the “Kansas City Star”, who was considered to be “the best master Hemingway ever had” and who taught Hemingway his writing style, was quoted in this book as saying, “Use verbs. Give action, not adjectives. Don’t criticize; be positive. Why do you want to louse up your reader?”

Here’s a Hemingway quote not found in this biography I’m reading: “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”