Top 30 Jack Hemingway Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

Tennis parents and stage mothers should take note. The kid has got to want to do it, not just to please the parent, but for himself.

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.

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.

I spent the first 50 years of my life being the son of a famous father and am now spending the last 50 as the father of famous children.

Hatchery trout are like New Yorkers who live crowded together. Eventually the hatchery trout shove the wild trout out. They aren’t used to congregating together and eventually they go crazy and disappear.

I was proud of Papa for his sports.

Frankly I never seriously read my father’s books until after he died. Up to then, there had been no point.

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

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

I am 75, but I’m younger than he was when he died because I didn’t live life as hard as he did.

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

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.’

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

I didn’t do a lot of fighting as a kid. But I hit doors a lot.

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.

I’m not a Hemingway scholar, so I’ve come across some surprises.

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

For years my nickname was ‘Bum.’

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

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.

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.

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

My father was my hero, both for the physical things he could do and for the values he taught me, about honesty and standing up for what you believe in. I never felt like I was living in his shadow.

Papa loved to have me show off my scars.

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.

I was always somebody’s son or somebody’s father.