Corey > Corey's Quotes

“You should not have any special fondness for a particular weapon, or anything else, for that matter. Too much is the same as not enough. Without imitating anyone else, you should have as much weaponry as suits you.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

“A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand.”
― Seneca

“A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.”
― Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

“Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“…Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn…”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“Remember to get the weather in your god damned book—weather is very important.”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p. 215”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“When you first start writing stories in the first person if the stories are made so real that people believe them the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for which is to make the story so real beyond any reality that it will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do. unpublished”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing

“The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.” Green Hills of Africa, p. 22”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs…”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“…you ought to write, invent, out of what you know and keep the people’s antecedants straight.”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” Excerpt from Nobel Prize acceptance speech”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing