Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.
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Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.
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It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
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Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
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A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
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I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
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Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
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Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?
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Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
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Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.
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No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.
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French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.
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I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
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We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.
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Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.
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There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.
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But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
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The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one'.... (The man who first said that) was probably a coward.... He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.
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If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.
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You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
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There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.
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I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.
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Il faut d'abord durer (First One Must Endure).
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If you're looking for messages, try Western Union.