September 2010
38 posts
INTERVIEWER
What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY
Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
...
Hemingway's...Idaho...legacy? →
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“That’s all we do, isn’t it - look at things and try new drinks?”
– “Hills Like White Elephants,” in Men Without Women
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Are You There God? It's Me, Ernest.
Are you still there, God? I think that abstract words such as smell, bad, twelve, and prepubescent are obscene beside concrete names of villages, numbers of roads, names of rivers, grades on quizzes and the dates on which almost-first kisses with eighth-grade girls almost-occurred. I often think about this on the afternoons I don’t have afterschool. I think hard as I wait for my mom or...
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“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit...”
– The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction No. 21, Ernest Hemingway, interviewed by George Plimpton
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Man, this is warming my heart.
INTERVIEWER
Did any writer influence you more than others?
DIDION
I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I...
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"What he was saying is, Listen all you novelists...
MAILER
One of my basic notions for a long, long time is that there is this mysterious mountain out there called reality. We novelists are always trying to climb it. We are mountaineers, and the question is, Which face do you attack? Different faces call for different approaches, and some demand a knotty and convoluted interior style. Others demand great simplicity. The point is that style...
“‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘Don’t be so tough so early in the...”
– To Have and Have Not
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the...”
– “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” Esquire, Sept. 1935.
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country....”
– “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” Esquire, Sept. 1935.
“Hemingway has his classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike...”
– Elizabeth, Prozac Nation (via hasanyoneseenmymind)
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“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again...”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls
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"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch."
"Yes."
"It’s sort of what we have instead of God."
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves...”
– A Moveable Feast
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“…one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old...”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls
To hell with love.
Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It...
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“Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of...”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls
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“I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a...”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls
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“The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon....”
– “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Originally in Esquire “Julian” was named as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in “The Rich Boy” (1926) had written:...
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Um, so this exists.
Acclaim for Papa Funny
“I always knew he had it in him!” —Gertrude Stein “I would totally come back to life just to read this on a regular basis.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald “This is bull cocky.” —William Faulkner
(Via Sean H. Doyle/Jason Diamond.)
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“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you...”
– Letter to F Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted in Scott Fitzgerald (1962) by Andrew Turnbull (1962) Ch. 14
“neatly in tune with the song of a fish
i stand in the kitchen halfway to...”
– Bukowski (via becomingbeloved)
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me...
The Notorious B.I.G. = Ernest Hemingway
Papa Hemingway and Big Poppa have similar philosophies driving their work: machismo and economy of words. Biggie’s albums and Hemingway’s novels are both considered classics, referred to again and again by current writers and musicians. Biggie and Hemingway inflated their tales of toughness and got into violent conflicts with their contemporaries — ...
Exactly 60 years ago... →
thequincyreview:
Hemingway’s Into the Trees
BOOK NEWS / HISTORY
Exactly 60 years ago today, Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees was published by Scribner. It came after a rather long bout of writer’s block—roughly ten years. The novel is about a war general, at least on the surface….
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“We were so poor in Paris. But the wine was good and the food was good. The...”
– A Moveable Feast, as paraphrased by Scott Klocksin
"Papa"
Gregorio Fuentes was the captain of Ernest Hemingway’s fishing boat in Cuba. He is often credited as being the model for the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea. (We’ll never know, but it sure seems like it.)
Here, he describes his relationship with Hemingway, in a Newsweek article reported by Francis Partridge (July 20th, 1999):
I was a captain in a Cuban fishing ship, and the...
“‘Love is a dunghill,’ said Harry. ‘And I’m the cock that gets on it to crow.’”
– Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1938)
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway,...”
– William Faulkner, as interviewed in Writers at Work, via taylorhurst89
“INTERVIEWER:
Is emotional stability necessary to write well? You told me once...”
– The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 21
Me neither. Other than to say this: I love you, Hemingway.
(via notsolinear)
WatchInside Hemingway’s Havana Home, CBS via Nathan Frandino
The Art of the Interview: What Ernest Hemingway,...
Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, has a piece in The Atlantic that discusses the interviewing process at the magazine.
George Primpton, The Review’s first editor-in-chief, believed that writers open up when they feel safe. In order to feel safe, they need to feel in control. Thus, Primpton’s “Art of…” interviews were conducted at a slow pace, and were both...
Hemingway at Work
“This morning I was reading Norberto Fuentes beautifully written book, Hemingway in Cuba. In contrast to his busy and active years in Europe and Key West, Fuentes writes in fascinating detail of the domestic life Hemingway enjoyed at the Finca Vigia. The Finca was the first home that Hemingway owned and it provided him a more tranquil life, although he was always looking for solitude....
