“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

• Discovery
• Experience
• Writing

“A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer.”

Distinguishing artistic seriousness from ponderousness or self-importance · Non-fiction, Death in the Afternoon

• Humour
• Style
• Writing

“I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.”

Defending deliberate restraint against critics who mistook stylistic choice for inability · Letter, 26 August 1940

• Criticism
• Style
• Writing

“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly.”

Treating truthful testimony as a responsibility when writers witness major historical events · Preface to The Great Crusade, 1940

• History
• Truth
• Writing

“The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.”

Making honesty about human beings the central difficulty of prose · Essay, Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba, 1934

• Humanity
• Truth
• Writing

“Make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

Expressing his belief that invented fiction can achieve a truth beyond literal fact · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 28 May 1934

• Imagination
• Truth
• Writing

“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”

Urging artists to prove their power through concentration rather than sheer scale · Letter, 5–6 January 1932

• Art
• Simplicity
• Writing

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life.”

Recognising that literature can arise equally from observation or profound personal suffering · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 4 September 1929

• Experience
• Suffering
• Writing

“I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out.”

Defending the language of The Sun Also Rises with typically mischievous understatement · Letter, 21 August 1926

• Humour
• Language
• Writing

“I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”

Joking about letter-writing as respectable procrastination · Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1 July 1925

• Humour
• Work
• Writing

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible.”

Arguing that originality should come from the writing rather than typographical novelty · Letter, 15 May 1925

• Convention
• Style
• Writing

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”

Linking convincing humour with hardship and accumulated experience · Letter, 6 December 1924

• Experience
• Humour
• Writing

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways.”

A compact example of Hemingway's dry observational humour · Article, The Toronto Star Weekly, 4 March 1922

• Humour
• Travel
• Writing

“Listen. If you die you're dead. And if you can write some more good stories you'll never die.”

Contrasting physical mortality with the endurance that worthwhile writing can achieve · Letter to Joseph Hopkins, 1936

• Eternity
• Mortality
• Writing

“When you make a living writing it is hard to write letters.”

A dry observation on how professional writing can leave little appetite for writing anything else · Letter to C. E. Hemingway, 26 March 1923

• Communication
• Work
• Writing

“Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.”

Linking literary achievement with judgement, detachment and the endurance needed to finish one's work · Non-fiction, Green Hills of Africa

• Character
• Perseverance
• Writing

“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

The memorable image behind his theory that much of a story's meaning can remain unstated · Non-fiction, Death in the Afternoon

• Imagery
• Simplicity
• Writing

“I rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Getting the words right.”

A characteristically concise statement of his commitment to revision and precision · Interview, The Paris Review, 1958

• Discipline
• Style
• Writing

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.”

Describing serious writing as a continual attempt to exceed one's previous achievement · Nobel Prize banquet speech, 1954

• Creativity
• Perseverance
• Writing

“The imaginative writer differs from the saint in that he identifies himself—to the neglect of his own soul, alas!—with the soul of the world.”

Contrasting the artist's immersion in worldly experience with the saint's pursuit of transcendence · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Art
• Faith
• Writing

“Drama is a means of expression, not a special subject matter.”

Defending the dramatist's freedom to draw upon any period, setting or subject · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Art
• Freedom
• Writing

“The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a permanent form because having the power of psychological description it can follow the thought of a man.”

Identifying psychological interiority as one of the novel's distinctive strengths · Essay, The Play of Modern Manners

• Literature
• Mind
• Writing

“We are only permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or our praise of that exacting mistress.”

Imagining life as the demanding source of both artistic praise and complaint · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Desire
• Life
• Writing

“All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far as they have had any philosophical or critical power, have had some philosophy, some criticism of their art.”

Arguing that serious artistic creation is accompanied by reflection on its principles · Essay, The Symbolism of Poetry

• Art
• Criticism
• Writing