Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
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You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?
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You don't have to destroy me. Do you?
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In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.
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How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.
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The time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you ... have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
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If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.
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Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.
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I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
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No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
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When things are going well, I like to have people to share it with. I've been alone in troubled times, and I don't mind that. Some things have to be endured alone. As Hemingway said, the human being is strong in all the broken places.
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I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
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Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.
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And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No
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My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.
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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
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Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.
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Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long.
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He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
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To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
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Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
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And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
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No one ever stopped when they were winning.