Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.
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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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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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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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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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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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Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.
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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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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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Il faut d'abord durer (First One Must Endure).
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But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
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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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I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was Chateau Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.
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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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French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.
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There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.
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No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.
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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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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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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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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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No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga.
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If you're looking for messages, try Western Union.
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Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.