“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."(on Ernest Hemingway”

“And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?”

“It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenesuntil they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drovehim to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in worksof genius?”

“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”

“I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.”

“I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.”