Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.
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Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
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A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
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I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.
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Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves sad and happy all at the same time Going away isn't really sad especially when your going enables a new kind of presence to be born.
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Never mistake motion for action.
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Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.
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I was always embarresed by the words 'sacred,' 'glorious,' and 'sacrifice' and the expression 'in vain.' We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
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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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Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
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If you have to go away,' she said,'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything?
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The shortest answer is doing the thing.
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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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When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.
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Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
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There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
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You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
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Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.
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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the other thing started again.
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A cat has absolute honesty.
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Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.
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My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.