Forget Your Personal Tragedy

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched form the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald