Ernest Hemingway’s Opinions and Meditations on What it Means To Be a Writer

“The most essential gift for a writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all good writers have it.”

“…He is too big a name for any writer to dismiss. At least not until  he or she has even read some of his work. Hemingway gently haunted me for years, but up until recently, my response has always been the same. Later. I’ll read you later. Another time. There was no way that any man as manly as Hemingway could understand any part of me I thought, and one thing I’ve always been certain of is that to love a book, I have to find myself in it. I love books because they have the ability articulate parts of me that I’m unable to make sense of alone. So how could Hemingway, this burly man with his gun and his whiskey,  do this?

My question was answered a few weeks ago when I came across an article with some of Hemingway’s quotes, which were all about what being a writer means to him. But they were also about what being a writer means to me. He articulated that part of me beautifully….”