Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
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The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.
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As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.
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For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
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No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
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Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.
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There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
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If a writer stops observing, he is finished.
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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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How little we know of what there is to know.
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If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
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It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
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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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I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.
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Your blood coagulates beautifully.
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But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
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If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
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All thinking men are atheists.
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Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
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War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.
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Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
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Having books published is very destructive to writing.
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I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.
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To be successful in writing, use short sentences.