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You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Adversity
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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Age
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As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Appearance
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I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Authors & Writing
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
-Ernest Hemingway
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I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
-Ernest Hemingway
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They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
-Ernest Hemingway
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
-Ernest Hemingway
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
-Ernest Hemingway, quoted in A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, 1966 edition, pt. 1, ch. 4 (1966)
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Books
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Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
-Ernest Hemingway
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How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
-Ernest Hemingway
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All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
-Ernest Hemingway
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All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently . Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
-Ernest Hemingway
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There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Books by and about Ernest Hemingway