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| Ernest Hemingway
As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Courage is grace under pressure. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination. Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. {from 'The Old Man and The Sea'} His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently. 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. If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work. In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. Never confuse motion with action. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective.No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war. Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock." Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something. Paradise: a beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin. The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. 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. There is no friend as loyal as a book. 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. There's no one thing that is true. They're all true. They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. 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. To be a successful father . . . there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years. When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea. Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure? You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer. You're beautiful, like a May fly. |
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