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I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Chimp
Talking
Hands
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.
Amy Hempel
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Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
Amy Hempel
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I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble.
Amy Hempel
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I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
Amy Hempel
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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
Amy Hempel
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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
Amy Hempel
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
Amy Hempel
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I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.
Amy Hempel
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There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
Amy Hempel
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When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.
Amy Hempel
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I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.
Amy Hempel
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They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.
Amy Hempel
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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
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It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Amy Hempel
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All those years on the psychiatrist's couch and suddenly the couch is moving. Good God, she is on that couch when the big one hits. Maidy didn't tell you, but you know what her doctor said? She sprang from the couch and said, My God, was that an earthquake? The doctor said this: Did it feel like an earthquake to you?
Amy Hempel
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He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
Amy Hempel
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I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
Amy Hempel
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Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
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I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
Amy Hempel
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Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
Amy Hempel