Fitzgerald And Hemingway Quotes

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.

Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?" "Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’ll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

I didn’t want to kiss you good-bye—that was the trouble— I wanted to kiss you good night— and there’s a lot of difference. —ERNEST HEMINGWAY Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife who washes the socks and the children, and returns phone calls and library books and types. In other words, the reason there are so many more Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius. It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A. And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween. Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater matinees--on Saturdays? Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure, chicken pox or chipped teeth? Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference. Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training. And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help. I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader, and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted. Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny, tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary, and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse unless she also helps with the laundry.

Don't worry," she says. "Ernest always attracted obsessives. You were only one of many. And secretly, sometimes, I think he was flattered. Nobody ever stalked Fitzgerald.

she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?

I am asking Scribners to insert as a subtitle in everything after the eighth printing THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE) A greater Gatsby (Written with the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Prophet of THE JAZZ AGE)

[About Ernest Hemingway] He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited? Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”? I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth. In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense.

While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty... The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

John is almost famous for not being famous," Williams compadre Dan Wakefield complained in 1986. "This is Hemingway without bluster, Fitzgerald without fashion, Faulkner stripped of pomp.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas.

Stop that!” Ghost Hemingway ordered. “It’s like teaching goddamned cats to walk on their back legs.” He sighed. “Standing eggs on end in a dining car.” He signed again. “Talking to Scotty Fitzgerald sober.

And yes, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Faulkners and the Capotes. Drank while writing. Drink next to the typewriter. But the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more writers I met, and I guess I was just too drunk to put it together before but now I realized about half of them were sober. So you could be a writer and be sober. Very interesting

I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let’s pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD once wrote, “The rich are different from you and me,” to which Hemingway famously replied, “Yes, they have more money.

As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, describing the act of letter-writing: “Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving

I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.

We constantly forget this—and it causes us so much confusion and pain. As Hemingway would later write of Fitzgerald, “He thought [the rich] were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” Without a change the same will be true for us.

In his mind, the only thing you're supposed to feel while reading a book is a sense of superiority. He's the kind of person who believes all Real Literature has already been written by dead white men. If he could, he'd bring Hemingway back to life for one last cocktail, smoke a cigar with Fitzgerald, dissect the nature of human existence with Steinbeck.

Like many writers, Hemingway thought of his craft as a trade that he was continually learning and at the mercy of. He told his son Gregory of his own try at writing, “Writing’s got to flow and come easy if it’s good and this stuff ‘smells of the lamp.’ You know that old phrase—smells like you’ve been up all night working on it over a kerosene lamp” (James,

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn’t matter if you’re James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair.

So many books. Cookbooks with garish colors, full of pictures of plump brown birds and things mummy-wrapped in bandages of bacon. Plays and slender volumes of poetry with surnames I didn’t recognize. Endless books on World War II and Adolf Hitler, branded with the ubiquitous stark and menacing swastika. The Joy Of Sex, Ribald Rhymes, Dirty Limericks, Hemingway, Mailer, Fitzgerald, Salinger. Montague Summers. Wheatley, Crowley, Castaneda. Manson. Edgar Cayce, LaVey, Margaret Murray. Abrecan Geist. Colin Wilson. Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, many volumes. Dirty Jokes—hundreds of paperbacks with spines whitened with a thousand cracks. Lovecraft, Kuttner, Silverberg, Heinlein, and Sturgeon. Vonnegut. Older books whose names had long been rubbed from their ancient covers.

La idea de que la creación y las sustancias psicotrópicas vayan de la mano es uno de los grandes mitos de nuestra época, tanto a nivel intelectual como de cultura popular. (…) Los escritores que se enganchan a determinadas sustancias no se diferencian en nada de los demás adictos; ‘son necesarios para atenuar un exceso de sensibilidad’ no pasa de ser la típica chorrada para justificarse. He oído el mismo argumento en boca de operadores de quitanieves: que beben para calmar a los demonios. (…) Hemingway y Fitzgerald no bebían porque fuesen personas creativas, alienadas o débiles moralmente, sino por la misma razón que todos los alcohólicos. No digo que la gente creativa no corra mayor riesgo de engancharse que en otros trabajos, pero ¿y qué? A la hora de vomitar en la cuneta, nos parecemos todos bastante.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE -by Rochelle Distelheim To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife who washes the socks and the children, and returns phone calls and library books and types. In other words, the reason there are so many more Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius. It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A. And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween. Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater matinees--on Saturdays? Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure, chicken pox or chipped teeth? Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference. Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training. And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help. I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader, and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted. Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny, tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary, and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse unless she also helps with the laundry. -Rochelle Distelheim ===============================

✓Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve. ✓Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists? ✓History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole. ✓I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogative. ✓Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. ✓I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves ✓The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism. ✓If we practiced medicine like we practice education, wed look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years. ✓A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.

She knew the effort it took to keep one’s exterior self together, upright, when everything inside was in pieces, broken beyond repair. One touch, one warm, compassionate hand, could shatter that hard-won perfect exterior. And then it would take years and years to restore it. This tiny, effeminate creature dressed in velvet suits, red socks, an absurdly long scarf usually wrapped around his throat, trailing after him like a coronation robe. He who pronounced, after dinner, “I’m going to go sit over here with the rest of the girls and gossip!” This pixie who might suddenly leap into the air, kicking one foot out behind him, exclaiming, “Oh, what fun, fun, fun it is to be me! I’m beside myself!” “Truman, you could charm the rattle off a snake,” Diana Vreeland pronounced. Hemingway - He was so muskily, powerfully masculine. More than any other man she’d met, and that was saying something when Clark Gable was a notch in your belt. So it was that, and his brain, his heart—poetic, sad, boyish, angry—that drew her. And he wanted her. Slim could see it in his hungry eyes, voraciously taking her in, no matter how many times a day he saw her; each time was like the first time after a wrenching separation. How to soothe and flatter and caress and purr and then ignore, just when the flattering and caressing got to be a bit too much. Modesty bores me. I hate people who act coy. Just come right out and say it, if you believe it—I’m the greatest. I’m the cat’s pajamas. I’m it! He couldn’t humiliate her vulnerability, her despair. Old habits die hard. Particularly among the wealthy. And the storytellers, gossips, and snakes. Is it truly a scandal? A divine, delicious literary scandal, just like in the good old days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? The loss of trust, the loss of joy; the loss of herself. The loss of her true heart. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty. In the end as in the beginning, all they had were the stories. The stories they told about one another, and the stories they told to themselves. Beauty. Beauty in all its glory, in all its iterations; the exquisite moment of perfect understanding between two lonely, damaged souls, sitting silently by a pool, or in the twilight, or lying in bed, vulnerable and naked in every way that mattered. The haunting glance of a woman who knew she was beautiful because of how she saw herself reflected in her friend’s eyes. The splendor of belonging, being included, prized, coveted. What happened to Truman Capote. What happened to his swans. What happened to elegance. What truly was the price they paid, for the lives they lived. For there is always a price. Especially in fairy tales.

Nota de la autora ​La librería ficticia Le club de minuit que aparece en la novela, está inspirada en la mítica y mundialmente conocida Shakespeare & Company. La historia del que fue el refugio literario de Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald o James Joyce, se remonta al año 1919 en una localización distinta a la actual, la Rue de la Bûcherie, que se ha utilizado también en esta historia. Todo empezó cuando la librera y editora Sylvia Beach abrió la primera librería Shakespeare & Company en la Rue de l’Odéon y tuvo que cerrarla en 1941, en plena ocupación alemana en París, cuando un oficial nazi entró, intentando comprar una copia de Finnegans Wake, obra de ficción cómica de James Joyce. La librera se negó a vendérselo con la excusa de que era la única copia que tenía y que pertenecía a su colección personal. Dos semanas más tarde, el alemán regresó para anoticiarla de que todos sus bienes eran confiscados. Los libros desaparecieron de los estantes al cabo de unas horas. Años más tarde, en 1951, la librería reabrió con otro dueño, George Whitman, y Shakespeare & Company, tal y como la conocemos hoy en día en el 37 de la Rue de la Bûcherie, no solo es un emblema en la ciudad de París, sino también una atracción turística que ocupa seis pisos y tiene café propio. Nada que ver con la olvidada y ficticia Le club de minuit, cuyo interior también he inventado, ya que no tiene nada que ver con la librería real y actual que tuve la suerte de visitar hace unos años. ​Por otro lado, el George Whitman de Le club de minuit solo tiene en común con el auténtico George Whitman (Nueva Jersey, 1913 – París, 2011) su nombre, alguna frase y la palabra Tumbleweeds que me ha gustado añadir a esta intensa trama. Sylvia Beach en la primera librería Shakespeare & Company (1919-1941) George Whitman en su librería Shakespeare & Company

Editor Maxwell Perkins had an eye for prose. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among the writers he had ushered through the publishing process at Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perkins took what was originally Wolfe’s 294,000-word, door-stopping tome and pared it down . . . to a still-whopping 223,000 (626 pages). The result was Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe’s novel about life in the mountain town of “Altamont” and the goings-on at a boardinghouse called “Dixieland.” His mellifluous sentences poured one over another, describing in sumptuous detail many a barely veiled reference to Wolfe’s hometown. Upon publication, Asheville’s families tore through the book looking for versions of themselves.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a café in Paris overlooking the Luxembourg Garden, just off of Rue Saint-Jacques. Rue Saint-Jacques is likely the oldest road in Paris, and it has a rich literary history. Victor Hugo lived a few blocks from where I’m sitting. Gertrude Stein drank coffee and F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized within a stone’s throw. Hemingway wandered up and down the sidewalks, his books percolating in his mind, wine no doubt percolating in his blood. I came to France to take a break from everything. No social media, no email, no social commitments, no set plans . . . except one project. The month had been set aside to review all of the lessons I’d learned from nearly 200 world-class performers I’d interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show, which recently passed 100,000,000 downloads. The guests included chess prodigies, movie stars, four-star generals, pro athletes, and hedge fund managers. It was a motley crew. More than a handful of them had since become collaborators in business and creative projects, spanning from investments to indie film. As a result, I’d absorbed a lot of their wisdom outside of our recordings, whether over workouts, wine-infused jam sessions, text message exchanges, dinners, or late-night phone calls. In every case, I’d gotten to know them well beyond the superficial headlines in the media. My life had already improved in every area as a result of the lessons I could remember. But that was the tip of the iceberg. The majority of the gems were still lodged in thousands of pages of transcripts and hand-scribbled notes. More than anything, I longed for the chance to distill everything into a playbook. So, I’d set aside an entire month for review (and, if I’m being honest, pain au chocolat), to put together the ultimate CliffsNotes for myself. It would be the notebook to end all notebooks. Something that could help me in minutes but be read for a lifetime.

The now-literary-minded masses read an astonishing rush of new novels during this period: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Newly minted intellectuals tried to parse James Joyce’s Ulysses or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. New fans of the arts listened to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and saw plays by Eugene O’Neill, who won three Pulitzer Prizes during the 1920s.

On Writing The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the readers. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing god work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. Four twentieth century writers; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers - common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit…. for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because that’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jubs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter. You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the pages what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you, or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again, you must not come lightly to the blank page. I am not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or to cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it isn’t the moral olympics and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car. If you take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else.

To Frances Turnbull Nov. 9, 1938 p. 368 I've read the story carefully and, Frances, I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotionsto sell. This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories "In Our Time" went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt ajd known. In "This Side of Paradise" I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929); Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold (1929); F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920); and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Du musst erst furchtbar verletzt werden, bevor du ernsthaft schreiben kannst. E. Hemingway, Brief an F. Scott Fitzgerald

After the first dozen or so, Bruce began placing the books on a table rather than returning them to the shelves. His initial curiosity was overwhelmed by a heady wave of excitement, then greed. On the lower shelf he ran across books and authors he’d never heard of until he made an even more startling discovery. Hidden behind a thick three-volume biography of Churchill were four books: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929); Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold (1929); F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920); and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). All were first editions in excellent condition and signed by the authors.

That’s how I feel now, here in California, in my little house behind the big house. I have my list of approved players—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Harper Lee, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Shakespeare, King David.

was reminded of the oft-quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d once said, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway’s famous reply had been, “Yes. They have more money.” But even I knew it wasn’t that simple.

Like most Americans, I was raised to be a white man. I read William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski. I came to identify with the emotionally disengaged characters, the staccato sentences, the irreverent dirty old man voice. The books I read asked me to imagine the power I might have. I got a woman pregnant and then worried that they wouldn't get an abortion, tying me down forever when all I wanted to do was continue experiencing my freedom. I wrote poems about the absurdity of writing poems, enjoying the decadence of imagining my readers drinking in my disregard for them. Being likable, explaining myself to others were not prerequisites of protaganism. I watched women move, their hips and dresses, their lips on glasses, their breasts heaving, all that offered up to me to enjoy, to consume. The fact that I was a brown woman was not something that seemed immediately relevant when I was younger. I moved through the world with the sense that I would have the same kind of power as the protagonists I read and movies I watched.

Harriet thought of a story that Guy was fond of telling. Fitzgerald was supposed to have said to Hemingway, ‘The rich, they’re different from us,’ to which Hemingway replied, ‘Yes, they’ve got more money.’ Guy saw this as a debunking of Fitzgerald but Harriet felt that Fitzgerald showed more perception than Hemingway. A person who grew up in the security of wealth was different. It seemed to her she saw this difference in the tolerant, even admiring, amusement with which Angela watched the men lowering her whisky.

Talking Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, they agreed how none of them, not a single one of those white boys, could write a sentence as good as Zora Neale Hurston.

Tell me some philosophy that’s not adolescent. Self- expression—the new freedom for women-Freud, that Great Excuse?” “There is progress, though, Lucia. Myself, I’ve progressed, in taste, from Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway.” “How much progress is that?” “A damn long distance on the road to bigger and broader vocabularies.

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.

In Paris in the 1920s, he bought Beaune by the gallon at a wine cooperative, and would and did drink five or six bottles of red at a meal. He taught Scott Fitzgerald to drink wine direct from the bottle which, he said, was like ‘a girl going swimming without her swimming suit’. In New York he was ‘cockeyed’ he said for ‘several days’ after signing his contract for The Sun Also Rises, probably his first prolonged bout. He was popularly supposed to have invented the Twenties’ phrase ‘Have a drink’; though some, such as Virgil Thomson, accused him of being mean about offering one and Hemingway, in turn, was always liable to accuse acquaintances of free-loading, as he did Ken Tynan in Cuba in the 1950s.