Deadshot

Hemingway on Writing

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 - Letter to Bernard Berenson (24 September 1954); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Hemingway on Punctuation

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

Letter (15 May 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

otherpress:

Hemingway (via Pulpit mag)

“Papa”

Double Dicho

Ernest said “Thought is the enemy of sleep.” This was a double dicho: “Sleep is the enemy of thought.” He told this to his close friend Hotchner after a day in which Hotchner had been assigned to Vienna to cover the Hungary situation (this was 1956), a planned safari had been canceled. The studio with “The Sun Also Rises” had messed around with his book.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

A man can be defeated but not destroyed.

“

—	ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and The Sea ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Papa Hemingway (Biography by Hotchner)

somethingtoobrave:

Ernest told about a very big, cocky black bear out West, who had made life miserable for everyone by standing in the middle of the road and refusing to budge when cars came along. It got so bad that no one could use the road. But Ernest heard about him and drove along the road to seek him out; suddenly, sure enough—there was the bear. A really big bear. He was on his hind legs and his upper lip was pulled back in a sneer. Ernest got out of the car and went over to him, “Do you realize that you’re nothing but a miserable, common black bear?” Ernest said to him in a loud, firm voice. “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.”

Ernest said he really laid it on him and the poor black bear began to hang his head, then he lowered himself to all fours and pretty soon he walked off the road. Ernest had destroyed him. From that time on he used to run behind a tree and hid whenever he saw a car coming and shake with fear that Ernest might be inside, ready to dress him down.

(p. 19-20 in Pappa Hemingway, by AE. Hotchner)

I am reading the book right now. I think the Dos Equis dude us based on Papa.