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.
Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.
When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that. So the director's task is just that β to direct, to point the way. Then the actor takes over. And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.
Speak to me...be eloquent, be brilliant for me. Improvise! Rhapsodize!... I ask for cream and you give me milk and water... Please gather your dreams together into words. - Roxanne, Cyrano de Bergerac
After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.