Like all truly brave people Antonio is light-hearted and likes to joke and make fun of serious things.
Notes from Wikiquote
Hemingway is describing his friend, the famous bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, no matter how justified, is not a crime.
Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ernest Hemingway (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.