Hemingway told a Paris Review interviewer ‘you can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love’.
In the same interview he comments ‘if a writer stops observing he is finished’ but suggests we don’t need to observe consciously or consider how our observations will be useful. I think the open-ness he implies that writers might usefully cultivate – a kind of permeability to experience, perhaps – is the same kind of open-ness that allows love to flourish.
Love and writing, go together like a horse and carriage, eh.
HANNAH VINCENT 