All Quotes

"Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions."

"I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others."

"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too."

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

"Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."

"It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."

"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

"Why did the chicken cross the road? Hemingway: To die. In the rain."

"I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

"Being a professional author is a great job. You get to work at home, be your own boss, and wear whatever you want. Fact: Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises wearing a penguin costume."

"Below us there were hundreds of men from the British, the Canadian Battalions; a food truck had come up, and they were being fed. A new Matford roadster drove around the hill and stopped near us, and two men got out we recognized. One was tall, thin, dressed in brown corduroy, wearing horn-shelled glasses. He had a long, ascetic face, firm lips, a gloomy look about him. The other was taller, heavy, red-faced, one of the largest men you will ever see; he worse steel-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. These were Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, and they were just as relieved to see us as we were to see them."

"Hemingway was eager as a child, and I smiled remembering the first time I had seen him, at a Writers' Congress in New York. He was making his maiden public speech, and when it didn't read right, he got mad at it, repeating the sentences he had fumbled, with exceptional vehemence. Now he was like a big kid, and you liked him. He asked questions like a kid: "What then? What happened then? And what did you do? And what did he say? And then what did you do?" Matthews said nothing, but he took notes on a folded sheet of paper. "What's your name?" said Hemingway; I told him. "Oh," he said, "I'm awful glad to see you; I've read your stuff." I knew he was glad to see me; it made me feel good, and I felt sorry about the times I had lambasted him in print; I hoped he had forgotten them, or never read them. "Here," he said, reading in his pocket. "I've got more." He handed me a full pack of Lucky Strikes."

"Hemingway did not seem discouraged, but Matthews was. Hemingway said, sure, they would get to the sea, but that was nothing to worry about. It had been foreseen; it would be taken care of; methods had already been worked out for communication between Catalonia and the rest of Spain; by ship, by plane, everything would be all right. Roosevelt, he said, had made an unofficial offer- or so he had been told- to ship two hundred planes to France, if France would ship two hundred planes to Spain. That was one of the best things we had ever heard of Roosevelt, but where were they?"

"I grew up, you know, in a generation of war novels and macho—Hemingway’s being the most prominent."

"Mr. Theodore Kaufman, an American resident, tries to calculate [in his pamphlet Germany Must Perish] how many doctors and how much time it would take to sterilize all Germans. This idea was eagerly taken up by Mr. Ernest Hemingway who defended it in his preface to Men at War on pp. xxiii-xxiv. (New York, 1942.) Scratch a "democrat" and you always find a Nazi."

"[Hemingway] has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used."

"Do you know a good way to convince ladies who adore he-men that you are a he-man and not a sissy? Raise a challenging mustache, write a humorless book full of unabridged hells and damns and kindred phrases in the field of sex, and then come out blatantly in favor of the Loyalists' cause in Spain."

"I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...I wasn’t alone in being influenced by Hemingway. He had a great impact, I think, on modern Italian writing."

"He was a prickly character and rather exacting about financial matters in a way I found tiresome."

"I would like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculinist bias, in which for example Hemingway's masculinist mythology (and that of many other contemporary American male writers) was perceived as quite as bizarre and hysterical as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist fiction, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective itself would be puzzlingly obsolete."

"Right now I'm going to go to the J.F.K. Library [in Boston] to read the manuscript of The Garden of Eden. That was Hemingway's last book. The published version is not the whole thing; it's only 250 pages. There are two thousand pages of manuscript. Hemingway was trying to find a language that was about relationships and about community. In some senses he failed because now he is known for shooting all those animals, for bullfights and his suicide. But he was reaching for something else. He didn't burn the book; he just left it there. But he wasn't strong enough to see it through to publication. A lot of it has to do with sexual roles, and so I just want to see what he was aiming for. He's got a map of the shape of a novel, and I expect him to take me so far and then I'm going to have to go the rest of the way…he is our father. He is everybody's "papa." He told us he was, so I guess he is [she laughs]. He left some kind of a map. Like I say in China Men, my grandfather left the railroad as a message. Well, Father Hemingway left The Garden of Eden manuscript, and I want to find out where I'm going next."

"In his history of war correspondence, British author Phillip Knightley, a [Spanish] loyalist sympathizer, chastizes [sic] Hemingway for his "total failure to report the communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of 'untrustworthy' elements on the Republican side [of the Spanish civil war of the 1930s], when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might have prevented further horrors like this.""

"For Isaac Kotlarz, reinterpreting the past went together with a certain bad conscience: "Later on, when I read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, I found an enlightenment that did not correspond to the official fables: that reminded me of facts I had heard spoken of in Spain, but which I had not paid attention to at that time.""

"People should be able to figure out their place in the life-death cycle without killing animals. The trouble is that it relates to what Hemingway said: "You can't be a man until you've killed another one." I say bullshit! Why don't you try it without a gun? Maybe there's a gender difference there. Maybe a woman can do it and a man can't. I hate to say that, but you wonder. It isn't built into women to be hunters in our culture. Even a fisherwoman is unusual. Having a close relationship with an animal, particularly one that lives a short life, can be an intense, constant reminder of mortality."

"Hemingway, after a honeymoon of Stalinist favor, would receive his share of comradely vituperation a few years later-when he, in his turn, would tell too much about the communists in Spain in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls."

"In an American Literature class, the professor told us The Sun Also Rises was boring on purpose. Apparently, Hemingway was trying to capture Europe's useless frivolity from the 1920s—or something. I had read elsewhere that Hemingway loved every minute of his time over there, and when I said as much the teacher replied, “In this class we go through the author’s intentions and into what the book actually was.” What I learned: Hemingway should have taken a Hemingway class."

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

"Ernest Hemingway ate an apple before writing. This might or might not have explained his crisp, short sentences."

"American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?"

"I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand."

"You have to be an accomplished writer to imitate Henry James. Any journalist can produce a not quite passable imitation of Mr Hemingway. But it was not only the invention in technique that impressed us in Fiesta. It was the mood. English literature is peculiarly rich in first-class Philistine novelists – Surtees and Mr P. G. Wodehouse, for example. But their characters were always happy. Mr Hemingway has melancholy, a sense of doom. His men and women are as sad as those huge, soulless apes that huddle in their cages at the zoo."

"For Whom the Bell Tolls was not at all what the socialists wanted. They had been busy denying atrocities; Mr Hemingway described them in detail with relish. They had denied the presence of the Russians; Mr Hemingway led us straight into the front door of the Gaylord Hotel. He made Marty and la Passionaria as comic as any New Yorker correspondent could have done. From then on he was on the wrong side of the barricades for the socialists, while his pounding revolutionary heart still drove him from civilization."

"Behind all the bluster and cursing and fisticuffs he has an elementary sense of chivalry – respect for women, pity of the weak, love of honour – which keeps breaking in."

"Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness — it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding."

"You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit."

"Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."

"Easy writing makes hard reading."

"It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings."

"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start."

"I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better."

"Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates."

"Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up."

"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering."

"I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently."

"You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple."

"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

"Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light."

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen."