Quotes from bookA Moveable Feast
A Moveable Feast is a memoir by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling young expat journalist and writer in Paris in the 1920s. The book, first published in 1964, describes the author's apprenticeship as a young writer while he was married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson.
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 8: 'Hunger Was Good Discipline'
Context: You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens... There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: 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 you know."
“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
Source: A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
As quoted in Reporting (1964) by Lillian Ross
Source: A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
Variant: Where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.
Source: A Moveable Feast
“The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
Source: A Moveable Feast
“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast
Variant: I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Source: A Moveable Feast
