Hemingway Famous Quotes

Who hasn't thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It's an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they'd be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn't be responsible for them anymore. I'd have left behind something that spoke for itself.

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.

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?

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

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.

...who is the pioneer of modern journalism? Not Hemingway who wrote of his experiences in the trenches, not Orwell who spent a year of his life with the Parisian poor, not Egon Erwin Kisch the expert on Prague prostitutes, but Oriana Fallaci who in the years 1969 to 1972 published a series of interviews with the most famous politicians of the time. Those interviews were more than mere conversations; they were duels. Before the powerful politicians realized that they were fighting under unequal conditions--for she was allowed to ask questions but they were not--they were already on the floor of the ring, KO'ed.

Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I “just liked to drink.” I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.

There's a well kept secret to intense and heartfelt writing. Let your words bleed. (A new take on Hemingway's famous quote)

My mother used to say that if I couldn’t sleep I should count something that matters, anything but sheep. Count stars. Count Mercedes-Benzes. Count U.S. presidents. Count the years you have left to live. I might jump out the window, I thought, if I couldn’t sleep. I pulled the blanket up to my chest. I counted state capitals. I counted different kinds of flowers. I counted shades of blue. Cerulean. Cadet. Electric. Teal. Tiffany. Egyptian. Persian. Oxford. I didn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I counted as many kinds of birds as I could think of. I counted TV shows from the eighties. I counted movies set in New York City. I counted famous people who committed suicide: Diane Arbus, the Hemingways, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf. Poor Kurt Cobain. I counted the times I’d cried since my parents died. I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.

As Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”8 When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Democrats immediately recognized that it would give them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to radically alter America’s voting laws and procedures to benefit their party.

Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, and Yogi Berra are quotation superstars. Personas of this type are so vibrant and attractive that they become hosts for quotations they never uttered. A remark formulated by a lesser-known figure is attached to a famous host. The relationship is symbiotic and often enhances the popularity of both the host and the quotation.

Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.” “You aren’t?” asked Coleman. “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.

In those days there was no money to buy books. Books you borrowed from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. On a cold windswept street, this was a lovely, warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Sylvia had a lively, very sharply cut face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me. I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished. There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were the shelves and shelves of the richness of the library.

People feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course, these feelings are symptoms of the disease. Depression is a grave and life-threatening illness, much more common than we recognize. As far as the depressive being weak or inadequate, let me drop some names of famous depressives: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud. Terry Bradshaw, Drew Carey, Billy Joel, T. Boone Pickens, J. K. Rowling, Brooke Shields, Mike Wallace. Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Mark Twain.

Saturday evening, on a quiet lazy afternoon, I went to watch a bullfight in Las Ventas, one of Madrid's most famous bullrings. I went there out of curiosity. I had long been haunted by the image of the matador with its custom made torero suit, embroidered with golden threads, looking spectacular in his "suit of light" or traje de luces as they call it in Spain. I was curious to see the dance of death unfold in front of me, to test my humanity in the midst of blood and gold, and to see in which state my soul will come out of the arena, whether it will be shaken and stirred, furious and angry, or a little bit aware of the life embedded in every death. Being an avid fan of Hemingway, and a proponent of his famous sentence "About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” I went there willingly to test myself. I had heard atrocities about bullfighting yet I had this immense desire to be part of what I partially had an inclination to call a bloody piece of cultural experience. As I sat there, in front of the empty arena, I felt a grandiose feeling of belonging to something bigger than anything I experienced during my stay in Spain. Few minutes and I'll be witnessing a painting being carefully drawn in front of me, few minutes and I will be part of an art form deeply entrenched in the Spanish cultural heritage: the art of defying death. But to sit there, and to watch the bull enter the arena… To watch one bull surrounded by a matador and his six assistants. To watch the matador confronting the bull with the capote, performing a series of passes, just before the picador on a horse stabs the bull's neck, weakening the neck muscles and leading to the animal's first loss of blood... Starting a game with only one side having decided fully to engage in while making sure all the odds will be in the favor of him being a predetermined winner. It was this moment precisely that made me feel part of something immoral. The unfair rules of the game. The indifferent bull being begged to react, being pushed to the edge of fury. The bull, tired and peaceful. The bull, being teased relentlessly. The bull being pushed to a game he isn't interested in. And the matador getting credits for an unfair game he set. As I left the arena, people looked at me with mocking eyes. Yes, I went to watch a bull fight and yes the play of colors is marvelous. The matador’s costume is breathtaking and to be sitting in an arena fills your lungs with the sands of time. But to see the amount of claps the spill of blood is getting was beyond what I can endure. To hear the amount of claps injustice brings is astonishing. You understand a lot about human nature, about the wars taking place every day, about poverty and starvation. You understand a lot about racial discrimination and abuse (verbal and physical), sex trafficking, and everything that stirs the wounds of this world wide open. You understand a lot about humans’ thirst for injustice and violence as a way to empower hidden insecurities. Replace the bull and replace the matador. And the arena will still be there. And you'll hear the claps. You've been hearing them ever since you opened your eyes.

But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.

The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the dark ages, with the Visigoths. During the middle ages, this mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, was commonly a punishment for adultery. Shaving women's heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. After French troops occupied the Rhineland in 1923, German women who had relations with them later suffered the same fate. And during the second world war, the Nazi state issued orders that German women accused of sleeping with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners employed on farms should also be publicly punished in this way. Also during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.)

His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.

Driving through the “Túnel de la Bahía,” which was started two years after I was in Havana last, was completed in 1958 by the French company “French Societé des Grand Travaux de Marseille.” The 2,405 foot long tunnel takes you to the eastern side of the entrance of Havana harbor, on the “Via Monumental highway” located just behind the famous Morro Castle. Continuing east along Cuba’s northern coast through the rather grim Pan Americana, a Russian style housing development, on the Carretera Del Morro, brings you to “Cojimar,” one of the most charming Cuban towns near Havana. This picturesque fishing village is where Hemingway docked his boat “El Pilar” and was the inspiration for one of his most famous books, “The Old Man and the Sea.” It is said that the old man referred to in his book, was Gregorio Fuentes, a resident of Cojimar.

Harry’s New York Bar. It’s world famous, honey. The first cocktail bar in Paris. Inventor of the Bloody Mary. Hemingway used to hang out there.

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial ethnographies mention Muslim dancing women named as “turku-sanis” who performed in famous mēḷams in the Godavari Delta and also had sexual relations with men from any of the “non-polluting” castes like their Hindu counterparts (Hemingway 1907, 58). They also go to great lengths to demonstrate that the community of “dancing girls” in the region consisted of “both Hindu Bogams and Muhammadan Bogams … and Muhammadan girls are married to a khanjir or dagger” (Ul-Hassan 1920, 91–92).1

Aside from being famous, what do Beethoven, Mark Rothko, Hemingway, Francis Ford Coppola, Van Gogh, Alvin Ailey, Robin Williams, Sylvia Plath, Balzac, Jackson Pollock, Edgar Allan Poe, Axl Rose, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf have in common? They all suffered from some form of mental illness. Even

When he returned to Florida in the early part of 1939, Hemingway took his boat the Pilar across the Straits of Florida to Havana, where he checked into the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Shortly thereafter, Martha joined him in Cuba and they first rented, and later in 1940, purchased their home for $12,500. Located 10 miles to the east of Havana, in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, they settled into what they called Finca Vigía, the Lookout Farm. On November 20, 1940, after a difficult divorce from Pauline, Ernest and Martha got married. Even though Cuba had become their home, they still took editorial assignments overseas, including one in China that Martha had for Collier’s magazine. Returning to Cuba just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he convinced the Cuban government to outfit his boat with armaments, with which he intended to ambush German submarines. As the war progressed, Hemingway went to London as a war correspondent, where he met Mary Welsh. His infatuation prompted him to propose to her, which of course did not sit well with Martha. Hemingway was present at the liberation of Paris and attended a party hosted by Sylvia Beach. He, incidentally, also renewed a friendship with Gertrude Stein. Becoming a famous war correspondence he covered the Battle of the Bulge, however he then spent the rest of the war on the sidelines hospitalized with pneumonia. Even so, Ernest was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. Once again, Hemingway fell in lust, this time with a 19-year-old girl, Adriana Ivancich. This so-called platonic, wink, wink, love affair was the essence of his novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which he wrote in Cuba.

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.

As the famous Hemingway said, ‘the most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

Ernest Hemingway famously described Paris as “a moveable feast.” Baltimore is more like a permanent hangover. Once you have lived there, you will never be entirely sober again.

Everyone is still caught up in these postmodern gimmicks or they’re just trying to rip off their favorite modernist from high school. For poetry, it’s mostly the style made famous by T.S. Eliot. And fiction it’s usually Faulkner or Hemingway, the latter of which was never that interesting to begin with.

Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It’s an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they’d be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn’t be responsible for them anymore. I’d have left behind something that spoke for itself, like the Brooklyn Bridge.

these stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.