Quotes from Jack Hemingway

Stacy Keach was marvelous. He looked more like my father than anyone who had ever played him before.

I was proud of Papa for his sports.

Papa loved to have me show off my scars.

It's hard to think of your parents as lovers. You know you got here somehow, but it's hard to visualize.

My father was a fun-loving person, not the evil, sadistic, macho, woman-hating guy that comes through in some of the biographies.

He's never portrayed as being funny. He was a very funny, happy, lively person. Fun to be around and exciting. He was my hero.

He was a physically imposing presence - 6 feet tall and very broad in the shoulders - and an imposing intellectual presence as well. Whenever he was in a group, he dominated it.

His tastes were probably formed by whatever wife he was married to at the time and what he could afford.

When I was in prep school, an English teacher said to me, 'Hemingway, I expect more from you!' And I said, 'Why, sir?'

Papa set a high premium on telling the truth, and I believed everything he said.

I wanted to write a book about Hemingway's Paris, but a professor beat me to it. I suddenly realized other people were making a living off all the things that have to do with my family background so I've got one good story to tell and I'm telling it.

The only thing that's really important is the stuff he wrote. That's what he cared about, and that's what's worth protecting. The myth and the man time eventually separates. But the work endures.

We were out drinking and fishing one day, and somebody said to me, 'People are starting to make money off your name. You and your brothers should do it.'

When French troops entered Paris in August, 1944, Papa came in from Rambouillet and first liberated the Explorers' club. But his major objective was the Ritz. He came in and assured security, making sure nobody else could get to the wine cellar.

But watch out for certain kinds of morels with wine. They're like a hallucenogenic.

I'm not a furniture person. You sit on the stuff, sleep on it, make love on it.

There is a new way of seeing him now. Because of that, there has been a lot of scholarship in Hemingway that is more thorough.

At the time of his death and the few years before, I was just starting to pull myself together and make a reasonably good living after years of dismal failure. I think he would be delighted to know that I've stuck to one thing and have done it well.

People ask me what I do, and I tell them, 'I'm a fisherman and a hunter.' They look at me like I'm lazy or crazy.

My mother, along with Papa's other eventual wives - Pauline, Marty Gelhorn, Mary Welch - they all, at one time or another, no matter how angry they were at him at the moment, said, 'Look, Papa is special. He writes so beautifully. We have to let this go on.'

I know he wanted me to love fishing and hunting, and I believe that he deliberately set about to make me want to do it on my own initiative.

He was my hero, though it was probably for the wrong reasons. Because he could hit people harder than anyone else, and things like that. It's only recently I've come to understand how selfish he could be, how hard on his children.

You might have to go through some smaller rainbows to get at the big fish, but they're in there.

When he was with you, he was totally yours. Of course Papa might tell you to wait in the car for five minutes while he talked to just this one person and he'd be right back. He might be gone an hour and a half. He was a very hard person to get out of places, actually.