“I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”

“Some people are born with an amazing gift for storytelling; it’s a gift which I’ve never had at all.”

Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876 and who died in Paris in 1972 at the age of 95, was a legendary figure in France but almost unknown in her native land. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Lettres à l’Amazone, she appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs. 

In his various reminiscences about the early twenties Hemingway recalls with grim satisfaction how difficult it was to get his stories accepted. One persistent memory was associated with the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where he lived when he returned to Paris from Canada in 1924 after quitting his newspaper job.