Ernest Hemingway
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932
Posted on October 14, 2002 at 6:17 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
—Ernest Hemingway
Posted on October 10, 2002 at 8:44 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932
Posted on June 26, 2002 at 9:23 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.
—Ernest Hemingway, on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Selected Letters, 1950
Posted on September 6, 2002 at 9:42 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life- and one is as good as the other.
—Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters
Posted on January 29, 2003 at 10:12 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Posted on March 16, 2001 at 11:46 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
—Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters
Posted on March 12, 2001 at 9:58 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Posted on May 1, 2001 at 11:40 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
—Ernest Hemingway, Quoted in: A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway
Posted on January 20, 2002 at 2:58 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
—Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters
Posted on February 8, 2002 at 9:30 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Posted on January 17, 2002 at 8:19 AM
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