Ernest Hemingway vs. Ai Weiwei

"Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The…"

"Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again.""Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?""Yes. I want to ruin you.""Good,…"

"Never fall in love?""Always," said the count. "I am always in love."

"If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."

"When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve."

"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 wri…"

"Easy writing makes hard reading."

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. Bu…"

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, wil…"

"I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking t…"

"Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you…"

"The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

"The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his ro…"

"This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought…"

"Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only t…"

"Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living w…"

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loan…"

"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soi…"

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."