Tag Archives: Hemingway

10 Remarkable Quotes of Ernest Hemingway

  • There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.
  • What is moral is what you feel good after.
  • Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
  • Man is not made for defeat.
  • Nobody knows what’s in him until he tries to pull it out. If there’s nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man.
  • Courage is grace under pressure.
  • Never mistake motion for action.
  • Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
  • All you have to do is write one true sentence.
  • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.

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Chris George provides reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

12 Ernest Hemingway Memes

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By George wordsmiths absolutely love the observations of Ernest Hemingway. Here are a dozen of our favourite memes featuring Papa.

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Consider joining the By George Facebook page for daily posts of inspiration and motivation from the likes of Ernest Hemingway. Click here to “like”.  To pass along Papa’s wisdom, right click on these images and copy/save – and then share widely.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Ernest Hemingway on his craft of writing

  • All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will find that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you’re a writer.
  • Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel. There is no rule on how it is to write.
  • There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
  • A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it (you lose it if you talk about it).
  • All you have to do is write one true sentence.
  • My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
  • All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
  • Writing, at its best, is a lonely life…  for he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
  • You invent fiction, but what you invent it out of is what counts. True fiction must come from everything you’ve ever known, ever seen, ever felt, ever learned.
  • You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.
  • All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
  • When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.
  • If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
  • I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..
  • There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman – once lost, it is never recovered.

Chris George provides reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? Call 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Ernest Hemingway on effective writing

I couldn’t refer to authors’ rules on effective writing without mentioning my favourite writer and his perspective on what makes great writing. Ernest Hemingway wrote a lot about writing.

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Here’s a few rules from the Master on what it takes to write well.

  1. Use short sentences and short first paragraphs.
  2. Use vigorous English – passion, focus and intention.
  3. Be positive, not negative.
  4. Spend time to edit and rewrite. (“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”)

 

Joanna Young of the blog The Confident Writing Coach catalogued 27 gems from Hemingway on the art of writing.

Here Is Young’s list of Hemingway’s advice to writers:

1 Start with the simplest things

2 Boil it down

3 Know what to leave out

4 Write the tip of the ice-berg, leave the rest under the water

5 Watch what happens today

6 Write what you see

7 Listen completely

8 Write when there is something you know, and not before

9 Look at words as if seeing them for the first time

10 Use the most conventional punctuation you can

11 Ditch the dictionary

12 Distrust adjectives

13 Learn to write a simple declarative sentence

14 Tell a story in six words

15 Write poetry into prose

16 Read everything so you know what you need to beat

17 Don’t try to beat Shakespeare

18 Accept that writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done

19 Go fishing in summer

20 Don’t drink when you’re writing

21 Finish what you start

22 Don’t worry. You’ve written before and you will write again

23 Forget posterity. Think only of writing truly

24 Write as well as you can with no eye on the market

25 Write clearly – and people will know if you are being true

26 Just write the truest sentence that you know

27 Remember that nobody really knows or understands the secret

 

Joanna Young’s blog entry is here:

http://confidentwriting.com/2008/02/27-secrets-to-w/

 

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer or experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Musings of Ernest Hemingway

Readers of By George Journal will know one of our oft-quoted authors is Ernest Hemingway. Here are some favourite quotes.

  • Courage is grace under pressure.
  • Man is not made for defeat.
  • Never mistake motion for action.
  • Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
  • Nobody knows what’s in him until he tries to pull it out. If there’s nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man.
  • There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
  • What is moral is what you feel good after.
  • A big lie is more plausible than truth.
  • When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
  • In answer to the most frightening thing he ever encountered – “a blank sheet of paper.”
  • The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.
  • A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it (you lose it if you talk about it).
  • All you have to do is write one true sentence.
  • Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel. There is no rule on how it is to write.
  • There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.
  • There is no friend as loyal as a book.
  • My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
  • There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
  • All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
  • Writing, at its best, is a lonely life… for he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
  • That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
  • Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
  • Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
  • To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
  • All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

(ed. – This list was previously posted in By George Journal in Summer 2009.)

 

Ernest Hemingway on Writing

In October of 1954, Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although he did not attend the awards ceremony, the following remarks were read for him at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm on December 10, 1954.

 

Hemingway commented on his craft:

 

       Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

       For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

       How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is Ernest Hemingway’s last major work of fiction, first published in 1952. The book won a Pultizer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. On the surface, it is a tale of an aged fisherman and his struggle to land a giant marlin. At a deeper level, this classic novel studies man’s resolution, faith and endurance in the face of defeat. Here are a dozen great quotes from this timeless story:

  • Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
  • Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
  • He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.
  • No one should be alone in their old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable.
  • I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.
  • Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.
  • It’s silly not to hope. It’s a sin he thought.
  • The thousand times that he had proved it means nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
  • “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
  • Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
  • Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?
  • He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway’s 1940 epic war story, For Whom the Bell Tolls, provides glimpses into the author’s personal perspectives of the Spanish Civil War – and his bold, stark insights into war and politics, and killing, dying and the coming to terms with one’s mortality.  It is a novel preoccupied with death and, at the same time, with the nurturing of hope in the face of the atrocities of war.

 

Here are a dozen bons mots from the book:

  • Every one has to do what he can do according to how it can be truly done.
  • For what are we born if not to aid one another?
  • I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.
  • Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.
  • You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
  • Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all other days that ever come depend on what you do today.
  • I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.
  • How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I’d like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
  • There isn’t any need to deny everything there’s been just because you are going to lose it. Don’t be like some damned snake with a broken back biting at itself; and your back isn’t broken either you hound. Wait until you’re hurt before you start to cry. Wait until the fight before you get angry. There’s lots of time for it in a fight. It will be some use to you in a fight.
  • Whether one has fear of it or not, one’s death is difficult to accept.
  • I hate to leave it (life) very much and I hope I have done some good in it.  I have tried to with what talent I had…. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
  • There is no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.

 

Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms (published 1929) is a book of love and war. It focuses on a romance between an officer and nurse against the backdrop of World War I. The book has been tagged as Hemingway’s bleakest novel. However, it was Hemingway’s first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as “the premier American war novel from that debacle [World War I]”.

 

This book is a simple story of complex issues, which Hemingway has seemingly made simple. Here is a dozen great thoughts on love and war and man’s ability to survive them both.

  • All thinking men are atheists.
  • “There isn’t always an explanation for everything.” / “Oh, isn’t there? I was brought up to think there was.” / “That’s awfully nice.”
  • There is nothing as bad as war.
  • War is not won by victory.
  • “Fight or die. That’s what people do. They don’t marry.” / They love each other and they misunderstand on purpose and they fight and then suddenly they aren’t the same one…. There’s only us two and in the world there’s all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we’re gone and then they have us.
  • “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one”…. The man who first said that was probably a coward…. “He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”
  • Life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.
  • No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
  •  “Now I am depressed myself,’ I said. ‘That’s why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”
  • Wine is a grand thing. It makes you forget all the bad.
  • I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain…. There were so many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
  • If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

 

(ed. – This is the third of five Hemingway masterpieces to be featured in the 2012 By George Journal pages.)

 

Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

 

     Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises is an exploration of love and morality in the streets of Paris and Pamplona. It peers deeply into those things that provide man with meaning to his life and to relationships. The characters are not admirable, at times unlikable, yet the are very alluring. The reader is drawn to them like a moth to a flame – and, in getting to know Jake, Brett and Robert, we are left singed and anxious.  With this story, Hemingway succeeded in giving us a remarkable account and unforgettable lesson.   

     Here is a dozen gems from The Sun Also Rises:

  • I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
  • You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.
  • I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people.
  • It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
  • Everyone behaves badly–given the chance.
  • This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.
  • We should not question. Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.
  • You are all a lost generation.
  • It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
  • Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship.  
  • Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.
  • That was morality: thing that made you disgusted afterward.

 

     The photo is from the 1957 movie starring Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn.

Hemingway remembered by A.E. Hotchner

In 1968, A.E. Hotchner wrote a very moving tribute to his great friend Ernest Hemingway. In his book, Papa Hemingway, Hotchner shared many wonderful stories and his insight into the brilliant author. Here are some great Hemingway quotes, as recounted by A.E. Hotchner. 

  • Every man’s life ends the same way and it is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another.
  • Never confuse movement with action.
  • Nobody knows what’s in him until he tries to pull it out. If there’s nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man.
  • The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer…. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
  • Man can be destroyed but not defeated.
  • You don’t own anything until you give it away.
  • You invent fiction, but what you invent it out of is what counts. True fiction must come from everything you’ve ever known, ever seen, ever felt, ever learned.
  • Greatness is the longest steeplechase ever run; many enter; few survive.
  • I only write once on any one theme; if I don’t write it all that one time, then it is not worth saying.
  • There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman – once lost, it is never recovered.
  • How the hell can you bleed over your own personal tragedies when you’re a writer? You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terrible before they can write seriously. But once you get the hurt and can handle it, consider yourself lucky – that is what there is to write about and you have to be as faithful to it as a scientist is faithful to his laboratory. You can’t cheat or pretend. You have to excise the hurt honestly.
  • All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will find that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you’re a writer.
  • Writing at its best is a lonely life…. For he does his work alone, and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity or the lack of it each day.
  • You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.
  • If I can’t exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible.

Photo: Hotchner and Hemingway (and Mary seated in the middle) poolside at LaConsula, Malaga, Spain, the morning of his 60th birthday – 1959

 

Hemingway on writing

On answering a question about “how” he writes, whether with an outline or notes, Ernest Hemingway stated:

       No, I just start it. Fiction is inventing out of what knowledge you have. If you invent successfully, it is more true than if you try to remember it. A big lie is more plausible than truth. People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

SOURCE:  From A.E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway – Chapter 11 Ketchum, 1958

Of Hemingway and Bullfighting

Through this year, By George Journal is celebrating one of the greatest authors of our time – Ernest Hemingway. Herein is 20 of our favourite quotes from Papa’s 1932 tribute to the sport and art of bullfighting – Death in the Afternoon.  

In his own bibliographical note, Hemingway writes that the book “is not intended to be historical or exhaustive. It is intended as an introduction to the modern Spanish bullfight and attempts to explain that spectacle both emotionally and practically.”

Interwoven in his expose of bullfighting, Hemingway also provides his opinions on good story-telling and excellence in writing. In fact, within this book is found some of the Master’s greatest insights into his craft.

  • Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.
  • The usual bullfighter is a very brave man, the most common degree of bravery being the ability temporarily to ignore possible consequences. A more pronounced degree of bravery, which comes with exhilaration, is the ability not to give a damn for possible consequences; not only to ignore them but to despise them.
  • A bullfighter is not always expected to be good, only to do his best. He is excused for bad work if the bull is very difficult, he is expected to have off-days, but he is expected to do the best he can with the given bull.
  • Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
  • The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
  • In appearance he (Domingo Lopez Ortega) had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house, a good, mature, but rather thick-jointed figure, and the self-satisfaction of a popular actor.
  • 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.
  • All bad writers are in love with the epic.
  • All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
  • If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
  • When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.
  • There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
  • I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..
  • Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel…
  • Most men die like animals, not men.
  • Madame, there is no remedy for anything in life. Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes…
  • Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
  • There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
  • The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.
  • Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

Top-5 Favourites of our Favourite: Ernest Hemingway

A portrait of Ernest Hemingway hangs on our office walls and HE is ever-present as I tap away at the keyboard. Hemingway is a personal favourite – and inspiration – always has been.

Now it’s been 50 years since his untimely death. With this passing of time, on January 1st here in Canada, all of this great master’s works lose their copyright and enter into the public domain.  

To mark this occasion, we offer our top-5 favourite books – and through this year will share some of the most remarkable passages from these five masterpieces.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

A Farewell to Arms

The Old Man and the Sea

The Sun Also Rises

Death in the Afternoon 

 To read more of the genius of Ernest Hemingway, we direct you to our top three sources on the Net:

  1. http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/
  2. http://www.lostgeneration.com/hrc.htm
  3. http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/

Enjoy the read!

Our 10 FAV Hemingway Quotes

  • There is no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.
  • Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all other days that ever come depend on what you do today.
  • “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
  • Courage is grace under pressure.
  • Every one has to do what he can do according to how it can be truly done.
  • Never confuse movement with action.
  • What is moral is what you feel good after.
  • Nobody knows what’s in him until he tries to pull it out. If there’s nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man.
  • Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
  • Every man’s life ends the same way and it is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another.