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I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Needs
Last
Seem
Going
Ends
Cases
Always
Stories
Lines
Never
Seems
Since
Destination
Ever
Start
Wrote
Firsts
Known
Changes
Need
Story
Case
First
Lasts
Line

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
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
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I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
Amy Hempel
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I am not quite myself, I think.But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose.
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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I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes I give you three minutes to show me the spark.
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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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
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The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.
Amy Hempel
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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
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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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Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?
Amy Hempel
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I'm not good at small talk I'm not good at big talk and medium talk just doesn't come up.
Amy Hempel
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The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.
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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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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Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
Amy Hempel
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Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
Amy Hempel
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I get rational when I panic.
Amy Hempel
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Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
Amy Hempel