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The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.
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I felt very lonely when they were all there.
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I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
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What did I know best that I had not written about and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
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The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.
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My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
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I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
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I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
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One cat just leads to another.
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Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
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I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together
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Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
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Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
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If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.
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Never confuse motions with action.
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I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
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I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
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Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
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The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
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But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.
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Worry destroys the ability to write.
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Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.
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If a writer stops observing, he is finished.
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Write hard and clear about what hurts.