Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Writing is mainly perspiration, not inspiration.

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

I rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

You have to write a lot. And you have to rewrite what you wrote a lot more.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.