Profile: Ernest 'Papa' Hemingway= Quotes & Links

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A Few Quotes ~

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."

"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
~ A Moveable Feast (1964)

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."

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http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html

Biography

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Selected Bibliography

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Fourth edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1972.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. (Ed.). Ernest Hemingway's apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916-1917. NCR Microcard Editions: Washington, D.C., 1971.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Robert W. Trogdon (Eds.). The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence 1925-1947. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1996.

Clifford, Stephen P. Beyond the Heroic "I": Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and "masculinity". Bucknell Univ. Press: Cranbury, NJ, 1999.

Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected articles and dispatches of four decades. Edited by William White, with commentaries by Philip Young. Collins: London, 1968.

- Complete poems. Edited with an introduction and notes by Nicholas Gerogiannis. Rev. ed., University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1992.

- The Complete Short Stories. The Finca Vigía ed. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1998.

- Death in the Afternoon. Jonathan Cape: London, 1932.

- Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1981.

- A Farewell to Arms. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1929.

- Fiesta. Jonathan Cape: London, 1927.

- For Whom the Bell Tolls. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York 1940.

- The Garden of Eden. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1986.

- Green Hills of Africa. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York 1935.

- In Our Time. Boni and Liveright: New York, 1925.

- Islands in the Stream. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1970.

- A Moveable Feast. Jonathan Cape: London, 1964.

- The Nick Adams Stories. Preface by Philip Young. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1972.

- The Old Man and the Sea. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1952.

- Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. Panther Books/Granada Publishing: London 1985(1981).

- The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other stories, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1961.

- The Sun also rises. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1928(1926).

- The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1926.

- Three Stories & Ten Poems: Ernest Hemingway's First Book. A facsimile of the original Paris Edition published in 1923. Bruccoli Clark Books: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1977.

- True at First Light. Edited with an Introduction by Patrick Hemingway. Arrow Books/Random House: London 1999.

- Winner Take Nothing. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1933.

Josephs, Allen. For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway's Undiscovered Country. Twayne: New York, 1994.

Lacasse, Rodolphe. Hemingway et Malraux: destins de l'homme. Profils; 6, Montréal 1972.

Lynn. Kenneth S. Hemingway. Simon and Schuster: London, 1987.

Mandel, Miriam. Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions. Scarecrow Press: Metuchen, NJ and London, 1995.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York, 1985 (Macmillan: London, 1986 (Harper & Row: New York 1985).

Nelson, Gerald B. & Glory Jones. Hemingway: Life and Works. Facts On File Publications: New York, 1984.

Palin, Michael. Hemingway's Travels. Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 1999.

Phillips, Larry W (Ed). Ernest Hemingway on Writing. Grafton Books: London, 1986 (1984).

Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: an Annotated Chronology: an Outline of the Author's Life and Career Detailing Significant Events, Friendships, Travels, and Achievements. Omni chronology series, 1 Omnigraphics, Inc: Detroit, MI, 1991.

Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: The Final Years. W.W. Norton: New York 1999.

Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: the Homecoming. W.W. Norton: New York, 1999.

Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: the Paris years. W.W. Norton: New York 1999.

Reynolds, Michael S. The Young Hemingway. W.W. Norton: New York, 1998.

Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Basil Blackwell: New York and Oxford, 1987 (Princeton U.P. 1976).

Trogdon, Robert W. (Ed.). Ernest Hemingway: A Documentary Volume. In: Dictionary of Literary Biography (series) Vol. 210. Gale Research Inc.: Detroit, Michigan, 1999.

Wagner-Martin, Linda (Ed.). A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford, 2000

The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts, has an extensive collection of books and manuscripts, and holds more than 10,000 photos of Ernest Hemingway. Cuba History : Ernest Hemingway http://www.cuba-junky.com/cuba/ernest-hemingway.htm Ernest Hemingway isn't just remembered in Cuba, he's an institution and a cottage industry. The rambunctious American writer first started frequenting the island in the 1920s, when he was living just across the straits in Key West, the southernmost of the islands on the tip of the U.S. state of Florida. He moved there with his third wife Martha Gellhorn in 1940 and lived there until 1960, when he returned to the United States for medical treatment. He committed suicide the following year in Ketchum, Idaho. Cuba formed the backdrop for a lot of his writing, particularly 'The Old Man and the Sea', and the farm he lived in became a pilgrimage in the 1950s for Hollywood's rich and fashionable. Hemingway was genuinely loved in Cuba, where he was known simply as "Ernesto" (his rather self-conscious attempts to spread his own preferred nickname of "Papa" were not quite as successful). In his turn, he donated his own Nobel prize for Literature to the Cuban people, and when the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by Castro in 1959 he was reported to have been delighted. Hemingway met Castro in 1960, when Fidel awarded him several prizes for big game fishing. As narcissists obsessed with their own macho images, the two men had a lot in common. He described the revolution as 'an honest' one but it also has to be remembered that he died before Castro had declared himself to be a Communist. All his haunts have now, predictably, become tourist meccas in Cuba. Starting with the Floridita bar he used to frequent in Havana, to his farm Finca Vigia which now lies on the edge of the expanding city, to the little fishing village of Cojimar 10 km east of Havana where he kept his yacht. Finca Vigia is now a museum with Hemingway's library of 9,000 books, stuffed heads and the typewriter he used to compose many of his masterpieces all laid out just as they were. One thing which might alarm Castro supporters and revolutionaries the world over is that the Cuban leader was reported to have taken Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' - an account of the Spanish civil war - into the Sierra with him in the 1950s to read as an example of guerrilla war. Master wordsmith Hemingway certainly was but history has shown him to be a rather less reliable historian or journalist! Favorite spots of Ernest Hemingway: "La Bodeguita del Medio", the bar in Habana Vieja where he used to drink his Mojitos. "La Floridita" In Habana Vieja as well for drinking his Daiquiries. Both bars are today very touristic and expensive places. The Museo Hemingway Monday to Saturday: Open from 9 am till 4 pm Sunday: Open from 9 am till 12.30 pm Admisson about $3 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cojimar Ernest's fishing boat 'El Pilar' is on display here. Cojimar is used as the setting for Hemingway's Nobel prize winning novel, 'The Old Man and the Sea'. In 1962 a huge neo-clasical monument was built here to honor Hemingway, and in its center is featured a guilded bust of the great American author and international sportsman. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gregorio Fuentes Born July 11 1897, Lanzarote, Canary Islands. Hemingway's captain was probably the role model for the main character in the 'Old Man and the Sea'. He had lived at Calle 98 #209 till January 2002. He immigrated to Cuba as a 6-year-old boy onboard a ship in which his father was the cook. Tragically, his father died during the voyage. Another Canary Island immigrant took care of him. Around 1930 Hemingway hired Fuentes to captain his boat, 'El Pilar', named after his wife at the time. After Hemingway left Cuba Fuentes donated the boat to the Cuban government. January 13, 2002 HAVANA, Cuba (AP) -- Gregorio Fuentes, who was boat captain to Ernest Hemingway when the late American writer lived in Cuba, died early Sunday at age 104, his family said. Fuentes had suffered from cancer. For nearly 30 years, Fuentes was captain, cook and friend to the American writer. Many say he was the inspiration for the protagonist in Hemingway's classic 'The Old Man and the Sea'. "He died in the house he had always lived in," his grandson Rafael Fuentes, 48, told The Associated Press. He has buried Sunday afternoon. Tuesday, 12 November, 2002, 12:48 GMT Cuba agrees Hemingway deal Castro has read For Whom the Bell Tolls three times Cuba has agreed to a US-funded project to preserve thousands of Ernest Hemingway's artefacts, including a rejected epilogue for his classic work For Whom the Bell Tolls. President Fidel Castro joined Hemingway family members and US congressman James McGovern to make the announcement at a ceremony on the writer's Havana estate. Under the agreement, all Hemingway documents will be copied by digitalisation and microfilm and copies stored in the JFK Library in Boston. The conservation plan includes the restoration of the wooden power boat Hemingway used for deep sea fishing and for occasionally patrolling German submarines among the islands of the Gulf Stream during World War II. Hemingway made Cuba his home More than 2,000 documents, including manuscript material and letters from Hemingway to his wife, Mary, and son, Gregory, his editor Max Perkins and Adriana Ivancich, the young Italian countess he was in love with, will also be preserved. The bookshelves at Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), Hemingway's nine-acre estate in San Francisco de Paula, also hold more than 9,000 books, many annotated in the margins by the Nobel prize-winning novelist. There are some 3,000 photographs and undeveloped negatives in the house as well as bullfighting paintings, antelope heads from hunting trips to Africa and unfinished bottles of gin, Campari and Bacardi. The manuscript material found on Hemingway's estate is expected to shed light on the final years of the writer's life. Grateful After Hemingway's death, his widow gave the property and its belongings to the young revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. Today it is a museum, although the public can only glimpse the interior through the windows. Cuban curators preserved the home exactly how the Hemingways had left it, looking like the writer had "just stepped down the drive to pick up his mail", according to Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of Hemingway's editor. Phillips hopes to raise $500,000 (£319,610) through donations to fund the project. The Rockefeller Foundation has already given an initial grant of $75,000 (£48,000). US congressman James McGovern helped bring about the agreement between the Cuban Government and members of Hemingway's family. He said Cuban and American people had been kept apart for too long "by political emnity and rhetoric". Speaking at the ceremony, which he attended in his trademark green military fatigues, President Castro said he had "many things to be grateful to Hemingway for". The 76-year-old revealed he had taken For Whom the Bell Tolls into the hills of eastern Cuba with him in his days as a guerrilla fighter. Ernest Hemingway died on July 2, 1961. Ernest Hemingway Death: Ernest Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. He had been released from hospitalization at the at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for severe depression; and he had also received shock therapy. Hemingway's alcoholism is often associated with his eventual death. Ernest Hemingway | What were the details and events surrounding Hemingway's death? He had been on a three-day drive through some states in the north and was reported to have enjoyed himself. When he got home he had a nice dinner with his wife Mary, who sang on of their favorite songs called "Tutti Mi Chiamano Bionda". The next morning, Mary heard a shotgun go off in the house and she ran downstairs to find that Ernest had supposedly shot himself by accident while cleaning his guns. This was the cover up story she gave to the press. Although he didn't believe in suicide, as many of his stories and letters reveal, he must have found it was the only way out. A close friend,... [The entire page is 164 words long] Hemingway committed suicide, July 2, 1961, at about 5:00 a.m. in Ketchum, Idaho. He used a double barrel shotgun fired at the head; his father used a pistol. The many things that had recently happened overwhelmed him. He had just undergone shock therapy for saying that the FBI was following him, but he couldn't convince any one that they actually were. The FBI was keeping tabs because he had lived in Cuba until Fidel Castro took over. From the shock treatments, he became very weak mentally. Disabling his writing ability, also believed to have collaborated to his suicide. In 1951 Hemingway's mother, Grace, died. All of these, plus many more could have contributed to his suicide and his being "beaten" by his own life. Extra credit: Hemingway is also called by his familiar nickname "Papa"... His birthdate is sometimes listed in error as 1898. According to a 1954 article in the New York Times, "In most reference books and in his own conversation he is one year older because he gave 1898 as his birth date when he tried to enlist [in the army] early in 1917, and stuck to that date ever since"... Hemingway's father also committed suicide, shooting himself with a Civil War pistol in 1928... He wrote several short stories about the character Nick Adams, his youthful alter ego; they were collected in The Nick Adams Stories in 1972. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1954/press.html The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954 Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy In our modern age, American authors have set their stamp more and more strongly on the general physiognomy of literature. Our generation in particular has, during the last few decades, seen a reorientation of literary interest which implies not only a temporary change in the market but, indeed, a shifting of the mental horizon, with far-reaching consequences. All these swiftly rising new authors from the United States, whose names we now recognize as stimulating signals, had one thing in common: they took full advantage of the Americanism to which they were born. And the European public greeted them with enthusiasm; it was the general wish that Americans should write as Americans, thereby making their own contribution to the contest in the international arena. One of these pioneers is the author who is now the focus of attention. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Ernest Hemingway, more than any of his American colleagues, makes us feel we are confronted by a still young nation which seeks and finds its exact form of expression. A dramatic tempo and sharp curves have also characterized Hemingway's own existence, in many ways so unlike that of the average literary man. With him, this vital energy goes its own way, independent of the pessimism and the disillusionment so typical of the age. Hemingway evolved his style in the herd school of journalistic reporting. In the editorial office of the Kansas City newspaper where he served his apprenticeship, there was a kind of pressman's catechism, the first dictum of which was: «Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs.» Hemingway's purely technical training clearly led to an artistic self-discipline of uncommon strength. Rhetoric, he has said, is merely the blue sparks from the dynamo. His master in older American literature was Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, with its rhythmical stream of direct and unconventional narrative prose. The young journalist from Illinois was flung headlong into the First World War when he volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver in Italy, where he received his baptism of fire at the Piave front and was severely wounded by shell splinters. The nineteen-year-old's first violent experience of war is an essential factor in Hemingway's biography. Not that he was daunted by it; on the contrary, he found that it was a priceless asset for a writer to see war at first hand - like Tolstoy at Sevastopol - and to be able to depict it truthfully. Several years were to elapse, however, before he could bring himself to give an artistically complete account of his painfully confused impressions from the Piave front in 1918: the result was the novel A Farewell to Arms in 1929, with which he really made his name, even if two very talented books with a European post-war setting, In Our Time (1942) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), had already given proof of his individuality as a storyteller. In the following years, his instinctive predilection for harrowing scenes of action and grim spectacle drew him to Africa with its big-game hunting and to Spain with its bullfighting. When the latter country was transformed into a theatre of war, he found inspiration there for his second significant novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), in which an American champion of liberty fights for «man's dignity» - a book in which the writer's personal feelings seem more deeply involved than anywhere else. When mentioning these principal elements in his production, one should not forget that his narrative skill often attains its highest point when cast in a smaller mould, in the laconic, drastically pruned short story, which, with a unique combination of simplicity and precision, nails its theme into our consciousness so that every blow tells. Such a masterpiece, more than any other, is The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the unforgettable story of an old Cuban fisherman's duel with a huge swordfish in the Atlantic. Within the frame of a sporting tale, a moving perspective of man's destiny is opened up; the story is a tribute to the fighting spirit, which does not give in even if the material gain is nil, a tribute to the moral victory in the midst of defeat. The drama is enacted before our eyes, hour by hour, allowing the robust details to accumulate and take on momentous significance. «But man is not made for defeat», the book says. «A man can be destroyed but not defeated.» It may be true that Hemingway's earlier writings display brutal, cynical, and callous sides which may be considered at variance with the Nobel Prize's requirement for a work of an ideal tendency. But on the other hand, he also possesses a heroic pathos which forms the basic element in his awareness of life, a manly love of danger and adventure with a natural admiration for every individual who fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death. In any event, this is the positive side of his cult of manliness, which otherwise is apt to become demonstrative, thereby defeating its own ends. It should be remembered, however, that courage is Hemingway's central theme - the bearing of one who is put to the test and who steels himself to meet the cold cruelty of existence, without, by so doing, repudiating the great and generous moments. On the other hand, Hemingway is not one of those authors who write to illustrate theses and principles of one kind or another. A descriptive writer must be objective and not try to play God the Father - this he learned while still in the editorial office in Kansas City. That is why he can conceive of war as a tragic fate having a decisive effect on the whole of his generation; but he views it with a calm realism, void of illusion, which disdains all emotional comment, a disciplined objectivity, stronger because it is hard-won. Hemingway's significance as one of this epoch's great moulders of style is apparent in both American and European narrative art over the past twenty-five years, chiefly in the vivid dialogue and the verbal thrust and parry, in which he has set a standard as easy to imitate as it is difficult to attain. With masterly skill he reproduces all the nuances of the spoken word, as well as those pauses in which thought stands still and the nervous mechanism is thrown out of gear. It may sometimes sound like small talk, but it is not trivial when one gets to know his method. He prefers to leave the work of psychological reflection to his readers, and this freedom is of great benefit to him in spontaneous observation. When one surveys Hemingway's production, definite scenes flare up in the memory - Lieutenant Henry's flight in the rain and mud after the panic at Caporetto, the desperate blowing up of the bridge in the Spanish mountains when Jordan sacrifices his life, or the old fisherman's solitary fight with the sharks in the nocturnal glow of lights from Havana. Moreover, one may trace a distinctive linking thread - let us say a symbolic warp reaching back a hundred years in the loom of time - between Hemingway's latest work, The Old Man and The Sea, and one of the classic creations of American literature, Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, the white whale who is pursued in blind rage by his enemy, the monomaniac sea captain. Neither Melville nor Hemingway wanted to create an allegory; the salt ocean depths with all their monsters are sufficiently rewarding as a poetic element. But with different means, those of romanticism and of realism, they both attain the same theme - a man's capacity of endurance and, if need be, of at least daring the impossible. «A man can be destroyed but not defeated.» This year's Nobel Prize in Literature has therefore been awarded to one of the great authors of our time, one of those who, honestly and undauntedly, reproduces genuine features in the hard countenance of the age. Hemingway, now fifty-six years old, is the fifth American author so far to be honoured in this way. As the Prize winner himself is unfortunately unable to be present for reasons of health, the Prize will now be handed to the United States Ambassador. From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 ++++++++++++++++ Various Quotes from Various Sources Googled! All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. All our words from loose using have lost their edge. All things truly wicked start from innocence. ~ Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools. As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary. But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Courage is grace under pressure. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts. Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object. 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. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive. 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. God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers. Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age. His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it. I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight. I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true. I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me. I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't. I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy. I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred. If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water. 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 moveable feast. If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work. In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary. In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason. It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way. Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. Never mistake motion for action. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. 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. Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock." Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something. Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him. 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. Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward. The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin. 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. The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. The shortest answer is doing the thing. The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. Ernest Hemingway There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are simple things, and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. There is no friend as loyal as a book. There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. There's no one thing that is true. They're all true. They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste. 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. Wars are caused by undefended wealth. What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea. When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first. Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure? You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself. You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer. You're beautiful, like a May fly. Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. Never confuse movement with action. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. Ernest Hemingway, "On the Blue Water," Esquire, April 1936 The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. ~ A Farewell to Arms Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. ~ The Old Man and the Sea The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. There isn't any symbolism. 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. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something. 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. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment. I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success. I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't. It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him. 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. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best --make it all up --but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure. 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. To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors. The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? The shortest answer is doing the thing. Never mistake motion for action. The first draft of anything is shit. Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. All thinking men are atheists. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places. All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry. If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. 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. 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. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. ~ Ernest Hemingway, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Posted: Sunday, September 02, 2007 Related Link: Timeless Hemingway! http://www.timelesshemingway.com/ Ernest Hemingway had a favorite expression: il faut d'abord durer. He used the saying in his private letters and on occasion inscribed the words in books he signed for friends. The French saying translates to "first, one must last." Ernest Hemingway is a writer who truly has lasted. He has earned the distinction of being called timeless. Timeless Hemingway includes a wealth of information about Ernest Hemingway. The principal pages of the web site are described below. Hemingway Photos (View photos of Hemingway through the years) The A Room (One of the largest Hemingway FAQs available) Hemingway Research Guide (Bibliography of books by and about Hemingway) Hemingway Quote Finder (Find that elusive Hemingway quotation) HemingWiki (The first wiki devoted entirely to Ernest Hemingway) Hemingway Store (Shop for Hemingway merchandise) One True Sentence (A blog devoted to Ernest Hemingway) Hemingway Links (Visit other Hemingway related web sites)