Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

Writers - all writers, even screenwriters - like to make their mark. I don't think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.

If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift.

I think you can be taught to write. You can't be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can't be given to you.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

Just because someone has stylistic limitations doesn't necessarily make them a worse writer.

So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.