Ernest Hemingway

Men will publish three pages and call it courage; the rest of us call that a leak.

Gertrude, he’s still mad I can spell decorative without sweating.

Scott, you’d lose a duel to a cocktail napkin and call it symbolism.

At least my sentences don’t need a footnote and a valet.

Both of you write like men trying to win a bar fight with a typewriter.

And Ernest writes like a bar fight learned punctuation.

I could keep up. I just preferred sentences that didn’t need a summer home.

You edited out the adjectives because you couldn’t keep up with them, Ernest.

Scott wrote like every paragraph needed a tuxedo.

This is why I said your generation was lost, and then you all made it a lifestyle.

Both of you are exhausting, but only one of you needs three drinks to explain a paragraph.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the short sentence won the war.

Ernest, darling, you write like a man trying not to be seen thinking.

Better than writing like the thought itself needs a footnote.

He says, from the man who treats a comma like a personal insult.