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Bravery
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Courage is grace under pressure.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Brevity
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It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
-Ernest Hemingway
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City Life, Cities
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If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Comedy
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A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Corruption
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Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Cowardice/Weakness
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Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Creativity
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From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
-Ernest Hemingway
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Criticism
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God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.
-Ernest Hemingway
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All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.
-Ernest Hemingway
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You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Depression
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That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Doctors
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I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Doubt
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Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Evil
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Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Exaggeration
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Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Excellence
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Exile
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You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around caf?s.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Experience
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In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Father
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To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Fight, Fighting
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I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Fish, Fishing
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Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Flight, Flying
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Friends
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There is no friend as loyal as a book
-Ernest Hemingway
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Grammar
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My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Heaven
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Books by and about Ernest Hemingway