God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.