Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
Interpretation
Writing can become an essential part of one's identity, almost akin to a vice, that persists until death.
Hemingway's quote illustrates the profound connection between a writer and their craft, suggesting that the act of writing can be both a compulsion and a source of immense joy. This duality highlights how deeply ingrained writing can become in a person's life, making it an enduring pursuit that can only be extinguished by the finality of death.
In practice
During a literary event, someone might use this quote to emphasize the importance of pursuing one's passion for writing.
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.
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.
Drag queens have always taken on that role of spilling the tea - and the tea is the emperor has no clothes!
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