BWare

On symbolism:

It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

–E. Hemingway, as told to George Plimpton, Spring 1958, the Paris Review

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it.

–E. Hemingway, as told to George Plimpton, Spring 1958, the Paris Review

[…T]hese tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the bush, yet ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at them,” he says.

Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

–E. Hemingway, as told to George Plimpton, 1958, the Paris Review

for AH

    KAREN
This is your game. I’ve never played before.

    FOLEY
It’s not a game. It’s not something you play.

    KAREN
Well, does this make any sense to you?

    FOLEY
It doesn’t have to, it’s something that happens.

It’s like seeing someone for the first time,
like you could be passing on the street,
and you look at each other for a few seconds.
There’s this kind of recognition,
like you both know something.
The next moment the person’s gone,
and it’s too late to do anything about it.

And you always remember it,
because it was there and you let it go,
and you think to yourself,
“What if I had stopped?
What if I had said something?
What if?
What if?”

It may happen only a few times in your life.

    KAREN
Or once.

    FOLEY
Or once.

Out Of Sight (1998) movie script
by Scott Frank, production draft.
From the novel by Elmore Leonard.