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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. address recorded for the Nobel Prize Committee, Dec. 10, 1954, accepting the Nobel Prize for literature. Published in Carlos Baker, Hemingway: the Writer as Artist, ch. 13, third edition (1963).)
Read more quotations about / on: work, lonely, alone, life
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Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it—although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. letter, Sept. 15, 1927, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (1981).
On searching for a title.)
Read more quotations about / on: alone, women
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I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. A Farewell to Arms, ch. 15 (1929).)
Read more quotations about / on: success
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You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is—but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. letter, Oct. 17, 1945, to poet and critic Malcolm Cowley. Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (1981).)
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That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. letter, Sept. 13, 1929, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (1981).
Biographer and critic Leon Edel observed, in a 1988 interview, "The greatest enemy of writers is depression, which they can't avoid.")
Read more quotations about / on: depression
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They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. A Moveable Feast, ch. 11 (1964).)
Read more quotations about / on: life
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Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.
(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. Letter, April 11, 1935, to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich. Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (1981).)
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