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Who really said it

Easy Writing's Vile Hard Reading

Not Ernest Hemingway — actually Richard Brinsley Sheridan Richard Brinsley Sheridan 1751–1816 · Anglo-Irish playwright, poet and Whig MP
Disputed Free to reuse

The line is the second half of a couplet in Sheridan’s satirical poem “Clio’s Protest; or, The Picture Varnished” — composed in 1771 and printed anonymously in 1772: “You write with ease, to shew your breeding; / But easy writing’s vile hard reading.” Quote Investigator ↗ finds Hemingway using only a reworded version and concludes he spoke the adage after it was already in circulation — the couplet predates his birth by more than a century.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Easy Writing's Vile Hard Reading” Richard Brinsley Sheridan, "Clio's Protest; or, The Picture Varnished" (composed 1771; printed anonymously 1772): "You write with ease, to shew your breeding; But easy writing's vile hard reading." Commonly credited to Ernest Hemingway, who was recorded circa 1926 using a different wording — "Easy writing makes hard reading" — in Samuel Putnam's memoir Paris Was Our Mistress (1947). Via Quotle.info

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Provenance

The couplet in its original form

Work
Clio's Protest; Or, The Picture Varnished
Composed
1771 · printed anonymously 1772 in The Rival Beauties; A Poetical Contest (London: W. Griffin)
First named to Sheridan
1819 edition, three years after his death
Form
Satirical verse; the maxim is the second line of a couplet

You write with ease, to shew your breeding;
But easy writing’s vile hard reading. Clio’s Protest, 1772

Spelling as printed in 1772 — “shew” for “show.” Later reprints swap the adjective: Thomas Moore’s 1825 Memoirs has “curst,” an 1821 magazine censored it to “d—,” and an 1835 newspaper printed “very.”

Printed volume, 1819
Clio's Protest (1819) on Google Books
Quote Investigator: Easy Writing's Vile Hard Reading

How we know

  • Quote Investigator ↗ traces the couplet to Sheridan’s “Clio’s Protest,” composed 1771 and distributed in 1772 in an anonymous London collection, and lists no earlier source for the wording.
  • Thomas Moore’s 1825 life of Sheridan quotes the couplet as “You write with ease, to show your breeding, / But easy writing’s curst hard reading” — readable in the Project Gutenberg text ↗, where Moore notes how many people quote the line without knowing its source.
  • Wikiquote ↗ lists both wordings under Sheridan, citing Clio’s Protest and, for the “vile” form, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations via Moore’s Life of Sheridan.
  • The Hemingway line is a different sentence. Wikiquote ↗ records only “Easy writing makes hard reading,” sourced to Samuel Putnam’s Paris Was Our Mistress (1947), p. 128.
Public domain

The couplet appeared in print in 1772 and the poem was published under Sheridan’s name in 1819; Thomas Moore’s Memoirs, which carries the widely reproduced “curst” version, dates from 1825. All are long past copyright and in the public domain in the United States. Note that Samuel Putnam’s 1947 memoir — the source for Hemingway’s different wording — is a separate, still-protected work; only the Sheridan couplet is free to reuse.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Everyone it has been pinned on

This couplet has been reassigned roughly once a century. Sheridan published it anonymously, which left it up for grabs almost immediately.

Ernest Hemingway Repeated it, didn't write it

Samuel Putnam’s 1947 memoir Paris Was Our Mistress records Hemingway saying “Easy writing makes hard reading” around 1926 — a different wording, and Putnam explicitly files it under “copybook triteness” among the apothegms Hemingway dropped in conversation. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes there is substantive evidence Hemingway spoke the adage only after it was already in circulation. Wikiquote ↗ carries the Hemingway line in exactly that shorter form, never as “vile hard reading.”

Lord Byron A misread stanza

An 1868 newspaper columnist hesitantly credited Byron, and an 1875 magazine article stated it outright. The likely cause is the “art of easy writing” stanza of Beppo (1818) — numbered XLVIII in the 1818 first edition and LI in the later Coleridge/Prothero text: “Oh that I had the art of easy writing / What should be easy reading!” — which you can read at Wikisource ↗. Byron uses “easy writing” and “easy reading.” He never writes “hard reading” at all.

Nathaniel Hawthorne Different saying, also misattributed

“Easy reading is damn hard writing” is a separate proverb often confused with this one and routinely credited to Hawthorne, largely because Maya Angelou attributed it to him in interviews. Quote Investigator ↗ found no substantive evidence Hawthorne used it and provisionally credits Thomas Hood, who wrote “the easiest reading is d__d hard writing” in 1837 — in quotation marks, suggesting it was already current.

The words are Sheridan’s, from a poem he published without his name in 1772 and that only carried his name from an 1819 edition onward — documented in full at Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

A hatchet job that outlived its target

“Clio’s Protest” is not a writing manual. It is a young Sheridan’s anonymous demolition of a rival’s verse, and the couplet is the punchline of a jab: the poet in question writes fluently to advertise his gentility, and the reader pays for it. The insult is that fluency was the point — ease as social display rather than craft.

Two and a half centuries later the line survives detached from its victim, its poem and its author, as a piece of workshop advice. That detachment is exactly what made it available for reattribution: a floating aphorism with no visible parentage attaches itself to whichever famous writer is nearest, and for the twentieth century that was Hemingway.

Sheridan meant it as an insult about a specific bad poet. It survives as general advice to everyone.

How the wording drifted: vile, curst, cursed, very

The adjective was never stable. The 1772 printing has “vile.” An 1821 New Monthly Magazine item censored it to “d— hard reading.” Thomas Moore’s 1825 Memoirs of Sheridan prints “curst.” An 1835 Philadelphia paper softened it to “very.” An 1826 North American Review notice dropped the adjective entirely: “Easy writing is hard reading.” All of these are documented at Quote Investigator ↗.

Moore, writing in 1825, already treated the couplet as ownerless — “one of those stray fragments, whose parentage is doubtful” — before restoring it to Sheridan. Its authorship was being lost within fifty years of publication, which is why every later century has had its own candidate.

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More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Easy Writing's Vile Hard Readingquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive tracing: Sheridan 1771/1772, the Byron confusion, and the 1947 Putnam citation for Hemingway.
Richard Brinsley Sheridanen.wikiquote.org

Lists both the 'curst' wording (from Clio's Protest) and the 'vile' wording (via the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations / Moore) under Sheridan.
Ernest Hemingwayen.wikiquote.org

Carries only 'Easy writing makes hard reading', cited to Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress (1947), p. 128.
Moore's Memoirs of Sheridan, Volume 1gutenberg.org

Free full text of the 1825 biography that quotes the couplet and calls its parentage doubtful.
Byron, Beppo (the 'easy writing' stanza)en.wikisource.org

The 'art of easy writing' stanza that got Byron wrongly credited — stanza LI in this edition, XLVIII in the 1818 first edition. It never says 'hard reading'.
Paris Was Our Mistressarchive.org

Scan of the 1970 Southern Illinois University Press edition of Putnam's memoir; the Hemingway passage is at p. 128 per Quote Investigator.

The real author

Who actually wrote it

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

1751–1816 · Anglo-Irish playwright, poet and Whig MP

Born in Dublin in 1751, Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote The Rivals and The School for Scandal before he was thirty, bought a controlling share of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and then spent three decades in the House of Commons as one of its most feared orators. “Clio’s Protest” is early, minor, anonymous work — a young man’s hatchet job on a rival versifier — and it is the least famous thing he wrote that everybody quotes. He died in 1816; the poem did not carry his name in print until an 1819 edition, three years after his death.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, “Clio’s Protest; Or, The Picture Varnished,” in The Rival Beauties; A Poetical Contest (London: Printed for W. Griffin, 1772), 16 — published anonymously; first ascribed to Sheridan in Clio’s Protest; Or, ‘The Picture’ Varnished, with Other Poems (London: Printed for Joseph Arnould, 1819), 27. Compare Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 1:52, which prints “curst” for “vile.” Hemingway’s variant: Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress (1947; repr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 128. Page citations per Quote Investigator.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Easy Writing's Vile Hard Reading’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/easy-writings-vile-hard-reading/

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