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Interviewer: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
Ernest Hemingway: Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
--From p. 42 of
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.
(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)
... I despised school -- or schools, for I was always changing from one to another -- and year after year failed the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky at least twice a week and was always running away from home. Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street -- a girl much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame. Because she murdered a half-dozen people and was electrocuted at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there, I'm wandering again ...
--From pp. 21-22 of
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)
The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final.
--From p. 21 of
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.(Philip Gourevitch, ed.)
