The Art of Tetman Callis

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“At a certain age the men writers change into Old Mother Hubbard.  The women writers become Joan of Arc without the fighting.  They become leaders.  It doesn’t matter who they lead.  If they do not have followers they invent them.  It is useless for those selected as followers to protest.  They are accused of disloyalty.  […]

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“It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually.  Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught.  They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop.  It is […]

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“Writers should work alone.  They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then.  Otherwise they become like writers in New York.  All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.  Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, […]

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“The way to paint is as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper and ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a […]

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“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” — Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

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“The great thing is to last and to get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.  Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and […]

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“Too much honor destroys a man quicker than too much of any other fine quality.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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“Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race.  Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a […]

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“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters.  A character is a caricature.  If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book may remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.  If the people […]

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“After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action.  If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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“Where you see gratuitous cruelty most often is in police brutality; in the police of all countries I have ever been in, including, especially, my own.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.  Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion.  There is no lonelier man in death, […]

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“If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes.  If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as […]

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“I ask you what confidence you would have in a Court thus constituted—a Court composed of partisan Judges, appointed on political grounds, selected with a view to the decision of questions in a particular way, and pledged in regard to a decision before the argument, and without reference to the peculiar state of the facts. […]

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