"There are events which are so great..." - Quote by Ernest Hemingway
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
More by Ernest Hemingway
“It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.”
“Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.”
“After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.”
More on Writing
“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
“Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.”
“When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived.”
More on Truth
“It would be wrong to put friendship before the truth.”
“Wherever the truth is injured, defend it.”
“If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they-and we all-can be 'liberated.' The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions-the vision-which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback.”