Tag Archives: Death in the Afternoon

Quotes from Ernest Hemingway About Writing

Hemingway face with a domestic catHemingway quote all sood booksHemingway writing is not architectureHemingway with three catsErnest Hemingway, a great writer and a complicated man. I found these photos of him with cats. He obviously loves them, yet, did you know he was a trophy hunter? I also found photos of him with a leopard and a lion among other animals he shot for sport.  How could he kill those beautiful animals and then come home and hold his living, breathing pets?  I’ll never forget that about him.

His quotes on writing are worth reading.

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

“If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

“Never mistake movement for action.”

Hemingway with typewriter about real writer

“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. . . .People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If ever he has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last for a long time.”

“anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_the_Afternoon This link tells about Hemingway’s passion for bullfighting:

“In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explores the metaphysics of bullfighting—the ritualized, almost religious practice—that he considered analogous to the writer’s search for meaning and the essence of life. In bullfighting, he found the elemental nature of life and death. In his writings on Spain, he was influenced by the Spanish master Pío Baroja. When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, he traveled to see Baroja, then on his death bed, specifically to tell him he thought Baroja deserved the prize more than he. Baroja agreed and something of the usual Hemingway tiff with another writer ensued despite his original good intentions.”

 

Hemingway with note about suicide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 Comments

Filed under Quotes