Having just finished Hemingway's provocative and inspirational A Moveable Feast, it seemed serendipitous to run across the Wired.com article "The Only Time Gabriel Garcia Marquez Saw Ernest Hemingway", which features Gabriel Garcia Marquez recounting some advice of Hemingway's.
"In his historic interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review, (Hemingway) showed for all time – contrary to the Romantic notion of creativity -that economic comfort and good health are conducive to writing; that one of the chief difficulties is arranging the words well; that when writing becomes hard it is good to reread one’s own books, in order to remember that it always was hard; that one can write anywhere so long as there are no visitors and no telephone; and that it is not true that journalism finishes off a writer, as has so often been said – rather, just the opposite, so long as one leaves it behind soon enough. ”Once writing has become the principal vice and the greatest pleasure,” he said, ”only death can put an end to it.” Finally, his lesson was the discovery that each day’s work should only be interrupted when one knows where to begin again the next day."
Read the Wired.com article here and Marquez's full account here.
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