I just read A Moveable Feast for the first time.  If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend picking it up.  What could be more fun than vicariously drinking wine and eating sausage with Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the early 1920’s, and sometimes with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound too? 

Not sold?  How about now: It’s only 126 page long. 

My copy is all scribbled with notes and astericks, but here are my two favorite bits.  The first one because it articulates every writer’s worst fear.  At one point, Gertrude Stein describes a short story of Hemingway’s as “inaccrochable,.”  Stein says: “That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.”

Please, please, don’t let my second novel be inaccrochable.

And this, which is infinitely more uplifting and helpful:

“But 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 have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.’  So finally I would write on true sentence, and then go on from there.  It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say…I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.”    

So here is my one true sentence:  The internet keeps me from burning oranges, and Hemingway is a genius.