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Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)

Biography

US novelist, who lived for much of his life in Paris. His first successful novel was _The Sun Also Rises_ (1926). Subsequent novels include _A Farewell to Arms_ (1929) and _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1940). The terseness and calculated simplicity of his style have been much imitated. He received the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature. He was a keen sportsman and admirer of bullfighting. Subject always to severe depressions, he commited suicide in 1961.


Some notes

I'll be posting a list of my dictionaries shortly, so you'll all know where I `borrowed' all this from. Corrections and additions of quotes appreciated as always.


Quotes by Others


@A: Berra, Yogi (1925-) +
@Q: I don't think so.  What paper does he write for?
@%: When asked if he'd ever heard of Ernest Hemingway after having been
introduced to him.

@A: Connolly, Cyril (1903-1974) *
@Q: He is the bully of the Left Bank, always ready to twist the milksop's
arm.
@R: _The Observer_ 24 May 1964

@A: Faulkner, William (1897-1962) *
@Q: He has never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the
dictionary.
@%: Attributed.  Reply below.

@A: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940) *
@Q: Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and
me.
@R: _All Sad Young Men_ (1926) `Rich Boy'
@%: See below for a rejoinder.

@A: Parker, Dorothy (1893-1967) *
@Q: He has a capacity for enjoyment so vast that he gives away great chunks
to those about him, and never even misses them....He can take you to a
bicycle race and make it raise your hair.
@R: _New Yorker_ 30 November 1929


Quotes by Ernest Hemingway



@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Because I am a bastard.
@R: in B. Morton _Americans in Paris_
@%: When asked why he had deserted his wife for another woman.

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what
you feel bad after.
@R: _Death in the Afternoon_ (1932) ch. 1
@K: morality

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death
and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the
fighter's honour.
@R: _Death in the Afternoon_ (1932) ch. 9
@K: sports:bullfighting

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: The great thing is to last and get your work done, and see and hear and
understand and write when there is something that you know and not before
and not too damn much afterwards.
@R: _Death in the Afternoon_ (1932)
@K: work

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really
happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all
happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the
bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how
the weather was.  If you can get so that you can give that to people, then
you are a writer.
@R: _Esquire_ December 1934 `An Old Newsman Writes'
@K: books; writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Yes, they have more money.
@R: _Esquire_ August 1936 `The Snows of Kilimanjaro'
@%: In reply to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
@K: money

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: A farewell to arms.
@R: Title of novel (1929)

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: `Just kiss me.'
    She kissed him on the cheek.
    `No.'
    `Where do the noses go?  I always wondered where the noses would go.'
    `Look, turn thy head' and then their mouths were tight together.
@R: _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1940) ch. 7
@K: kissing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: But did thee feel the earth move?
@R: _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1940) ch. 13
@K: sex

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very
much to leave it.
@R: _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (1940) ch. 43
@K: world

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
_Huckleberry Finn_.
@R: _Green Hills of Africa_ (1935) ch. 1
@K: people:Twain, Mark; writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: A writer's problem does not change.  It is always how to write truly
and having found out what is true to project it in such a way that it
becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.
@R: in Carlos Baker _Hemingway: The Writer as an Artist_ (1952)
@K: writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack
of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
@R: _Men at War_ (1942) introduction
@K: cowardice

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God.
He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after
one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
@R: _Men at War_ (1942)
@K: writers

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then
wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is
a movable feast.
@R: _A Movable Feast_ (1964) epigraph
@K: places:Paris

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: `Exactly what do you mean by `guts'?'
    `I mean,' Ernest Hemingway said, `grace under pressure.'
@R: _New Yorker_ 30 November 1929, interview with Dorothy Parker
@%: Commonly quoted as `Courage is grace under pressure.'
@K: courage

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: 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.  Bot nobody's going to get me in any
ring with Mr Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
@R: _New Yorker_ 13 May 1950
@K: writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
@R: _The Old Man and the Sea_ (1952) p. 103
@K: defeat

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: To be a successful father,  there's one absolute rule.  When you have a
kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
@R: in A. E. Hotchner _Papa Hemingway_ (1966)
@K: parenthood

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof
shit detector.  This is a writer's radar and all good writers have had it.
@R: _Paris Review_ Spring 1958
@K: writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of
necessary.
@R: in Lillian Ross _Portrait of Hemingway_
@K: heroes

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Forget your personal tragedy.  We are all bitched from the start and
you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.
But when you get the damned hurt use it--don't cheat with it.
@R: in Andrew Turnbull _Scott Fitzgerald_ (1962) ch. 14
@K: suffering

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: The sun also rises.
@R: Title of novel (1926)

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: Women make swell friends.  Awful swell.  But you had to be in love with
a woman to have a basis of friendship.
@R: _The Sun Also Rises_ (1926)

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Every man's life ends the same way.  It is only the details of how he
lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
@R: in _Sunday Times_ 1966
@K: dying; living

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have
become very succesful liars.
@R: _This Week_ 1959
@K: writers

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: All people are mixed up and it is normal, like a battle.
@R: in _The Times_ 1967
@%: Letter to Adriana Ivancic.
@K: psychology

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: People who win [the Nobel Prize] always seem to have to write the Old
en New Testaments to show how great they are.  They forgot that these were
written well enough in the first place.
@R: in _The Times_ 1967
@%: Letter to Adriana Ivancic.
@K: religion:bible

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition
against gossip.  It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the
sun burns it off.
@R: in _The Times_ 1967
@%: Letter to Adriana Ivancic.
@K: gossip; lies

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: What do intellectuals know?  Only to write about each other.  The
intellectuals never know the names....You always have to come along and
rebuild the language because the Academy destroys it.
@R: in _The Times_ 1967
@%: Letter to Adriana Ivancic.
@K: scholarship

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: There is no rule on how to write.  Sometimes it comes easily and
perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with
charges.
@R: in _The Times_ 1972
@%: Letter to Charles Poore.

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than
sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo
style of architecture.
@R: _Toronto Star Weekly_ 4 March 1922, in William White _By-line: Ernest
Hemingway_ (1967) p. 18
@K: places:Switzerland

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: You and me, we've made a seperate peace.
@R: _A Very Short Story_
@K: peace

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) *
@Q: I must say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the
unavoidable awkwardness in first trying to make something that has not
heretofore been made.
@R: _Writers at Work: Second Series_ (1963) interview
@K: style

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
@%: Acceptance speech for the Nobel Price, 10 December 1954.
@K: writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.  Organizations for writers
palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.
@%: Acceptance speech for the Nobel Price, 10 December 1954.
@K: writing

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: Poor Faulkner.  Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words.  I know them all right.  But
there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
@%: Attributed.  Cf. Faulkner, William.
@K: words

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk.  That will teach you to
keep your mouth shut.
@K: alcohol

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility.  And
when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of
murder.
@K: politics:fascism

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: But in modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
@K: war

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how
a conscience should function.
@K: conscience

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: Isn't it pretty to think so?
@K: self-deception

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: Never mistake motion for action.
@K: action; motion

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: Once we have a war there is only one thing to do.  It must be won.  For
defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
@K: war

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: Remember them as they were and write them off.
@K: remembrance

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961) +
@Q: Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
@K: retirement

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency;
the second is war.  Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a
permanent ruin.  But both are the refuge of political and economic
opportunists.
@K: politics

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken
places.
@K: world

@A: Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961)
@Q: There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted
armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else
thereafter.
@K: hunting; war


====The End====

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