"Ernest Hemingway on Writing" edited by Larry W Phillips

In this short book Phillips has collected quotes from Hemingway about writing, culled from his letters, his newspaper articles and interviews and his short stories and novels. These have then been arranged into thirteen chapters. It gives an insight into Hemingway, a man always trying to "write truly". There is little practical advice to aspiring writers (such as myself) but mostly exhortations. In this world where authors are mostly told to concentrate on technical details such as plot or character it is refreshing to see that Heningway (like Lamott in Bird by Bird or Prose in Reading Like a Writer) focuses so strongly on the words.

Some great quotes (this gentleman certainly had a gift for words):

• “I am trying to make ... a picture of the whole world ... boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.” (C 1)
• “The secret is that it is poetry written into prose” (C 1)
• “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” (C 2)
• “If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the knowledge of life that he has.” (C 2)
• “You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.” (C 3)
• “When you're in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars.” (C 5)
• “You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a licence to bring in your own improvements.” (C 5)
• “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” (C 6)
• "Keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.” (C 7)
• “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” (C 7)
• “Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.” (C 8)
• “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company ... All these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds.” (C 11)
• “It has always been much more exciting to write them to be paid for it.” (C 13)
• “I only think about writing truly. Posterity can take care of herself.” (C 13)
• “Some gents when they are working on a novel may be social assets but I am just about as pleasant to be around as a bear with sore toenails.” (C 13)
• “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” (C 13)

July 2019; 140 pages