"I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you….Like me to write you a little essay on The Importance of Subject? Well the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get….Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice…A dull subject I should say would be impotence. Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into yr. next book and sit back."

Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 15, 1925 (via scribnerbooks)