flâneur

Haunted by Hemingway's "One True Sentence"

russellmaxsimon.com · 1,360 words · saved by 1 readers

I've been working on a memoir and I want to give up.

A little way into A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumously published account of his time in Paris as a young writer, he delivers this passage that has haunted me ever since I have made my own living as a writer, and before that too: 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…

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