“But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think ‘Do not worry. 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.’ So finally I would write on true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say…I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.”
—A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
Speak Your Mind