Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don’t think I’d enjoy being in the same room with him. He’s not my kind of person.
After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages – he believed that if you crumpled them, you’d be insane in a year.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development – an insight came from that book.
People ask me, ‘What do you do?’ And I tell them I’m a writer, but always with the silent reservation, ‘I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.’
I don’t teach literature from my perspective as ‘Joyce Carol Oates.’ I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I’m teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
Whatever simplicity I’ve achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I’ve read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I’ve forgotten what the point was.
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.
I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
Of course, I’m of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can’t identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn’t yet historical.
After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at ‘Dracula.’ Halfway through it, I understood I’d never be going back, never ‘leaving’ the genre again. Since then, I’ve been on a fairly strict horror diet.
When I was in prep school, an English teacher said to me, ‘Hemingway, I expect more from you!’ And I said, ‘Why, sir?’
I like reading… French, Russian classics – Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
One gets the impression that this is how Ernest Hemingway would have written had he gone to Vassar.
Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
I wasn’t looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man – a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.
Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more – like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
I always envision myself being a Hemingway type.
I remember having to read ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ and I didn’t want to read it; I didn’t want to like Ernest Hemingway. I was being a stubborn teenager.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
They got into fact checking at the ‘Paris Review,’ and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway’s lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn’t lose those stories. They weren’t stolen from the platform.
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
You did not disturb Hemingway before noon on Monday through Friday – he was in his office, writing the books that made the lifestyle possible.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.
Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory,’ which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn’t write without feeling he was repeating himself. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
I don’t want to go around like some kind of bleeding giant or whatever, or thinking I’m a big deal, because it doesn’t help you do your work. I think people like Hemingway got into an awful lot of trouble that way.
My whole thing was, as much as I was inspired by what my parents do, and growing up on film sets, watching that made me really want to do that. I am my own person, and I think that the only thing with the Hemingway name is that it has gotten me in the door.
I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote ‘The Sun Also Rises’ 39 times.
‘The Sun Also Rises’ by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it.
I grew up with Mark Twain, and we had the complete Hemingway at home, of course in German translation.
‘The Sun Also Rises’ by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it.
Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple – or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren’t.
I’m the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.
I’m not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.
In ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes).
John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
I’m probably better known for boxing with Hemingway than for anything I’ve written.
Hemingway was a big influence – ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ though I disapproved of the later Hemingway.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development – an insight came from that book.
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.’
The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren’t people categorized as crime writers. I’d say I learned more from John O’Hara, who isn’t much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.
If you look at the 1960s, Hemingway was viewed on the basis of the myth of his lifestyles rather than viewing his work. Machismo was badly viewed; feminism was becoming a more noble cause. I think the feminists took him apart and assumed he mistreated women.
I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.
I wasn’t looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man – a geologist, an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.
Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn’t. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still… you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.
I don’t want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
