Remarks by Ernest Hemingway | V2Melody Quotations

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!”

A comic rule about accountability and the consequences of extravagant promises · Personal rule sent to Charles Scribner IV

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

Wryly contrasting the mythology of natural talent with the reality of learning a craft · Conversation with Arnold Samuelson, recalled in With Hemingway

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go.”

Describing his habit of allowing an idea to develop slowly rather than forcing it immediately · Conversation, as quoted in Charmed Circle

“If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”

Expressing deep suspicion of popularity as a reliable measure of artistic achievement · Conversation, recalled by Morley Callaghan

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Presenting writing as a lifelong process of learning rather than a skill finally mastered · New York Journal-American, 11 July 1961

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best.”

Valuing slow physical travel as a way of gaining an intimate memory of landscape · Article, collected in By-Line, Ernest Hemingway

“I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon.”

Acknowledging another writer's achievement in an area he felt unable to improve upon · Letter, 3 July 1956

“I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Responding to his Nobel Prize by publicly praising another writer he admired · Statement, The New York Times Book Review, 7 November 1954

“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing.”

Presenting prose fiction as a demanding craft requiring sustained invention · Letter to Bernard Berenson, 24 September 1954

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end.”

An exaggerated but revealing statement of his belief in a writer's mastery of language · Letter, 20 March 1953

“Having books published is very destructive to writing.”

Contrasting the demands and distractions of publication with the private work of creation · Letter to Bernard Berenson, 2 October 1952

“The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.”

Rejecting predetermined symbolism while leaving readers free to find meanings beyond the literal story · Letter to Bernard Berenson, 13 September 1952

“I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross.”

Drawing a boundary between irreverent humour and circumstances demanding seriousness · Letter, 21 June 1952

“My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”

Treating physical health pragmatically as the resource on which continued work depended · Letter, 21 February 1952

“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”

Mocking romantic notions of travel while describing one of his working habits · Letter, 9 July 1950

“Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part.”

A deliberately comic reversal of conventional ideas about war and ordinary life · Letter to Marlene Dietrich, 27 June 1950

“Nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.”

Using boxing imagery to express both literary competitiveness and respect for Tolstoy · Conversation, profile by Lillian Ross, 1950

“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.”

Reducing literary ambition to workmanship, persistence and completion · Letter to Arthur Mizener, 12 May 1950

“If it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”

Expressing faith that genuinely accomplished writing can outlive its author · Conversation, recalled by Malcolm Cowley, Life, 1949

“Easy writing makes hard reading.”

Suggesting that apparent ease in composition often produces weak prose · Conversation, recalled by Samuel Putnam, 1947

“But never feel as good as while writing.”

A concise declaration of the pleasure he found in the act of writing itself · Letter to Malcolm Cowley, 14 November 1945

“It's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is.”

Explaining the awkwardness writers face when judging or discussing their own work · Letter to Malcolm Cowley, 17 October 1945

“The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”

Presenting prose as a disciplined craft governed by principles rather than ornament · Letter, 23 July 1945

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see”

Describing direct experience as part of the cost and preparation of serious writing · Preface, The First Forty-Nine Stories, 1944

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