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Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it."

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

"The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

"Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."

"For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive."

"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes."

"Wars are caused by undefended wealth."

"Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object."

"The shortest answer is doing the thing."

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are simple things, and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

"Courage is grace under pressure."

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary."

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