Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Here’s two more quotes from one of the greats of literature:
“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
-from a letter to Bernard Berenson on Sept. 24, 1954, published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 edited by Carlos Baker
and
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
-from The New York Journal-American, July 11, 1961
from here.
Elsewhere on the internet:
Do Hemingway’s works still pack a literary punch?
The Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
Hemingway the war correspondent reported from Omaha Beach on D-Day.
The five words Hemingway said that gave Marlene Dietrich a whole philosophy for her life: “Never confuse movement with action.”
The full text of Hemingway’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954.
The annual Hemingway look alike contest.
Rejection letters received by bestselling authors, including Ernest Hemingway.
Has the author’s death eclipsed his work?
And coming soon…
Clive Owen as Hemingway and Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn, the journalist and novelist who went on to become Hemingway’s third wife, in Hemingway & Gellhorn, a movie directed by Philip Kaufman and will be appearing on HBO in May.
At the library we have quite a few books both by Hemingway and about his life and work. Come and check them out.
Robins AFB Library Blog 