"The further you go in writing the..." - Quote by Ernest Hemingway
The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
More by Ernest Hemingway
“Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.”
“Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”
“No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”
More on Writing
“I asked people who have already finished books for advice, which is akin to asking a mother with a four-year-old what childbirth is like.”
“Write till your ink be dry, and with your tearsMoist it again, and frame some feeling lineThat may discover such integrity.”
“The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.”
More on Solitude
“London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.”
“Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them”
“When things are going well, I like to have people to share it with. I've been alone in troubled times, and I don't mind that. Some things have to be endured alone. As Hemingway said, the human being is strong in all the broken places.”