“Writing is the only thing that makes me feel that I´m not wasting my time sticking around.”
“Writing at its best is a lonely life.”
“The only constructive thing I ever learned about women – that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember only as they were on the best day they ever had.”
“My life´s ambition is to write as good as a Cèzanne. Haven´t made it yet but getting closer all the time.”
“All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.”
“The worse death of anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do – and what you do makes you what you are – is to back up into the grave.”
“All of my books started as short stories. I never sat down to write a novel.”
“It doesn´t matter that I don´t write for a day or a year or ten years as long as the knowledge that I can write is solid inside me. But a day without that knowledge, or not being sure of it, is eternity.
“Don´t do want you sincerely don´t want to do. Never confuse movement with action.”
“All you need is a perfect ear, absolute pitch, the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his,the guts of a burglar, no conscience except to writing, and you´re in. It´s easy. Never give it a thought.”
“Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age”
“Paris and happiness are synonymous”
“How the hell can you bleed over your personal tragedies when you´re a writer? You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terribly before they can write seriously. But once you get the hurt and you can handle it, consider yourself lucky – that is what there is to write about and you have to be as faithful to it as a scientist is faithful to his lab. You can´t cheat or pretend. You have to excise the hurt honestly.”
“Fiction is invented out of what knowledge you have. If you invent successfully, it is more true than if you try to remember it. A big lie is more plausible than truth. People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.”
“All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you´ve read one one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to the readers, then you´re a writer.”
“the best weapon against lies is the truth”
Papa Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner
