First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. the hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.

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All good book are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

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All my life I’ve looked at works as though I were seeing them for the first time…

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Hemingway – On writing.
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