Ernest Hemingway

"If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed."

"Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important."

"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."

"The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it."

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

"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day."

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"The first draft of anything is shit."

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

"The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found."

"You are going to die like a dog for no good reason"

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."

"Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love."

"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. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

"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."