Literary Birthday – 21 July – Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born 21 July 1899, and died  2 July 1961.

Ernest Hemingway Quotes

1. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
2. One cat just leads to another.
3. We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
4. 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.
5. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
6. Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
7. Never use slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
8. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
9. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
10. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
11. All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Recommended reads:

1. 27 Gems On Writing From Ernest Hemingway
2. How To Write Like Hemingway With These 10 Easy Tips
3. Between Friends: Writing Advice From Hemingway To Fitzgerald
4. How Ernest Hemingway Changed The Writing Landscape

Source for Image: Lloyd Arnold, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ErnestHemingway.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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