Quotes About Hemingway

Manhattan, though, was an entirely different ballgame in a whole different kind of world, with a man who was brilliant and at the same time terribly charismatic.

If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.

I tell you I always tip. It's a matter of principle with me. I'm like Hemingway. I always do it second-nature.

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.'

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.

The symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance.

If the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nick Adams stories had been an undersized weed, asthmatic or phthisic, living out strong-man fantasies in the literature he produced, he would still be one of the great American writers.

Hemingway, eager not to miss the big battle even though he was suffering from influenza, managed to reach Colonel Buck Lanham's command post near Rodenbourg. The house had belonged to a priest suspected of being a German sympathizer. Hemingway took great delight in drinking a stock of communion wine and then refilling the bottles with his own urine. He claimed to have relabelled them 'Schloss Hemingstein 1944' and later drank from one by mistake.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

I'm probably better known for boxing with Hemingway than for anything I've written.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I'm out of the terse Hemingway school.

I spent an awful lot of time with Hemingway. And Hemingway had a remarkable ability to reach very noble goals through sometimes ignoble means.

I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said "an unhappy childhood." Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that's how novels worked.

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

The thing that was important to me about Hemingway at the time was that Hemingway taught me that you could be a writer and get away with it.

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?

Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.

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

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.