Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.
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I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.
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Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is
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Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
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When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.
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Religion is the opium of the poor.
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One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
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But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
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Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
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I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.
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The only kind of writing is rewriting.
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it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
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When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
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Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish.
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The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.
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Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
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My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
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I drink to make other people more interesting.
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I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
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For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
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But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.
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When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.