I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the urgency of expressing creative thoughts as they arise.
Ernest Hemingway highlights the spontaneous nature of creativity, emphasizing how thoughts and ideas can rapidly emerge in the mind upon waking. This quote illustrates the necessity for writers and artists to capture these fleeting moments of inspiration before they vanish, underscoring the importance of immediacy in the creative process.
In practice
In a workshop on writing and creativity, this quote can be used to inspire participants to jot down their ideas immediately.
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this will also be seen as artificial and distanced from life.
You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
Sweet bird, that shun the noise of folly, most musical, most melancholy!
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the βnot always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
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