Genius’ was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable...

Hemingway is overrated,Twain is even more lost at sea,And all truths point to the mouth of a woman,Where both her whispers and her screams,Are born.Pour another glass, Beer, wine, whiskey,I don’t care,So long as its...

Hem, you know I don’t think that owner’s wife where you live likes me. She wouldn’t let me wait upstairs for you.”I’ll tell her,’ I said.’Don’t bother. I can always wait here. It’s very pleasant...

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of...

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For...

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.

wonder what day god created the egg’ ‘how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks’. ‘eat a egg

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each...

Tis true what Hemingway says–if we’re lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920’s Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth’s dreams become a moveable feast...

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of...

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

I thought back to Meg’s advice about Hemingway sentences—simple declarative statements that showed the truth and distilled the meaning. My first attempt at that had been cynical and messed up. I gave it a go...

I’d known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I’d pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as...

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did notcompletely trust anyone.

But writers and their woes: they couldn’t be parted. Not for anything.

Write drunk. Edit Sober.

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there...

She kissed him but he didn’t seem to recognize it.

For me, all writing — storytelling and style — gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.

When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their...

My love is a six-toed mutant, like a Hemingway cat. Pet it wisely.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed...

We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure...

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn’t have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and...