18 quotes
All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
Only three things in my life I've really liked to do - hunt, write and make love.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
Never confuse movement with action.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
To be a successful father ... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'
Papa Hemingway (1966)
The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women - that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
Papa Hemingway (1966)
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Papa Hemingway (1966)