"it is all very well for you..." - Quote by Ernest Hemingway
it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
More by Ernest Hemingway
“I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.”
“Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.”
“This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.”
More on Writing
“In a way, I was safe writing”
“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
“I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.”
More on Simplicity
“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.”
“Greatness of spirit is accompanied by simplicity and sincerity.”
“Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum.”