Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I don't see how you can write well if you're not reading well at the same time. I think the only risk is reading too many books of one 'type' in a row.

My vocabulary is vast and expert, and I don't think I overuse any word.

I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

My family was always playing with words. It is little wonder that even after I got serious about writing, I've had a hard time getting serious about words.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.

Understand that writing is like an athletic activity. To play tennis well, you expect to keep practicing, but for some reason with writing, you think you should come out fresh the first time.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.

Study words so that you can use them significantly, effectively, worthily.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle: to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.

Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.

I think any comic book - or really, any book that you can read - in a sense is an educational tool in that it helps literacy. The more you read, the better you get at it. It almost doesn't matter what you read, the important thing is for young people to become readers.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

Anything works, as long as you write it properly.