Ernest Hemingway? Apocryphal Question for Quote Investigator: Questions about creative influence and artistic appropriation are often fraught with rivalry and controversy. I recall an extreme remark from the prominent writer Ernest Hemingway in which he asserted that the entire purpose of one artist might be to provide a single phrase or sentence to another artist. …
Tag Archives: Ernest Hemingway
Quote Origin: Easy Writing’s Vile Hard Reading
Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Lord Byron? Ernest Hemingway? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: There are two complementary and intertwined statements about reading and writing that I would like you to investigate: 1) Easy writing results in hard reading. 2) Easy reading requires hard writing. Many different phrases have been used to express these two thoughts, and …
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Quote Origin: For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn
Ernest Hemingway? William R. Kane? Roy K. Moulton? Avery Hopwood? Arthur C. Clarke? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Most people are familiar with short stories, but there is another class of works that might be called short-short stories. “Flash fiction” and “sudden fiction” are labels that are applied to this style of literature. One of …
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Quote Origin: Writing Is Easy; You Just Open a Vein and Bleed
Thomas Wolfe? Red Smith? Paul Gallico? Friedrich Nietzsche? Ernest Hemingway? Gene Fowler? Jeff MacNelly? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Whenever I have trouble writing I am reminded of a family of sayings which employ a gruesomely expressive metaphor to describe the difficult process of composition. Here are three instances: (1) Writing is easy. You just …
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