Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingwaywas an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1899
CityOak Park, IL
CountryUnited States of America
After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.
A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.
When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.
The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.
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.