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writing history and literature lit culture and society Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Susan Sontag Joan Didion Ray Bradbury Kurt Vonnegut George Orwell Susan Orlean Walter Benjamin Henry Miller Anais Nin David Ogilvy Isabel Allende Stephen King H. P. Lovecraft Malcolm Cowley John Steinbeck Herbert Spencer E. B. White Mary Karr Ann Patchett Mary Gordon Joseph Conrad Margaret Atwood David Foster Wallace Neil Gaiman

Famous Advice on Writing

The collected wisdom of great writers, including Vonnegut, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Kerouac, Atwood, Steinbeck, and more:

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Timeless wisdom on writing and knowledge from Papa

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Hemingway on writing.

Mark Twain Neil Gaiman Mary Karr Samuel Beckett Ernest Hemingway history and literature lit culture and society vintage photography

Famous authors as teenagers, the best thing since Einstein as a toddler. Pictured here: Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Mary Karr, Neil Gaiman, Mark Twain.

They missed 14-year-old Susan Sontag.

Ernest Hemingway history and literature writing quote thought and opinion lit

Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, adding to our ongoing archive of wisdom on writing.

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Ernest Hemingway reading The New York Times in bed, naked – can’t cover as much with an iPad… By his side, surprisingly, a dog. Photograph by George Leavens.

Ernest Hemingway writing history and literature lit creativity and innovation

When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love.

Ernest Hemingway on the pace and routine of writing

Orson Welles Ernest Hemingway history and literature history lit interviews culture and society

We had a very strange relationship… because I made fun of him, and nobody ever made fun of Hemingway.

[…]

The thing you never get from his books is his humor… But when he relaxed, he was riotously funny.

Orson Welles, smoking a cigar, on Hemingway.

(↬ Page Turner ᔥ book patrol)

Ernest Hemingway history and literature media and communication lit history advertising vintage

You’re tired all the way through. The fish is landed untouched by sharks and you have a bottle of Ballantine cold in your hand and drink it cool, light, and full-bodied, so it tastes good long after you have swallowed it. That’s the best of an ale with me: whether it tastes as good afterwards as when it’s going down. Ballantine does.
Hemingway makes a pitch for Ballantine Ale.
(↬ Copyblogger)

You’re tired all the way through. The fish is landed untouched by sharks and you have a bottle of Ballantine cold in your hand and drink it cool, light, and full-bodied, so it tastes good long after you have swallowed it. That’s the best of an ale with me: whether it tastes as good afterwards as when it’s going down. Ballantine does.

Hemingway makes a pitch for Ballantine Ale.

(↬ Copyblogger)

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“Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.”

A letter from yet-unpublished Ernest Hemingway to his mentor, Sherwood Anderson, March 9, 1922, from a new exhibition at Chicago’s Newberry Research Library.

Also see young Hemingway’s collected letters.

history and literature thought and opinion Ernest Hemingway war letters history literature culture and society death

All the heroes are dead. And the real heroes are the parents. Dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.

Ernest Hemingway’s letter to his parents after being severely wounded in Italy during WWI, from this collection of young Hemingway’s letters.