"Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t."
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Quote collection
Ernest Hemingway quotes (page 33 of 40)
798 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don't worry."
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"In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it."
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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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"You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity."
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"Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound."
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"Time is the least thing we have."
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"Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness."
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"As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself."
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"So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
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"In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style."
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"The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education."
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"Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it."
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"How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski."
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"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."
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"We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it."
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"He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled."
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"In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more."
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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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"I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee."
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