Quotes about Writing

How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing.

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story.

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another. -- Hemingway's advice to other young writers in A Moveable Feast.

Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.

But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people ... and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady

We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.

The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That's all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is?

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.