Critical Quotes
“This time
[Hemingway] discovered God, a Creator. . . It’s all right. Praise
God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me
kept him from touching it any further.” -- William Faulkner
comments on The Old Man and the Sea.
“I think you
are more intelligent than this mss . . . I want to say: me frien
Hem, kin knock yew over the ropes; and then I want to see the
punch delivered. I dont want gentle embraces in the middle of
the ring.” -- Poet Ezra Pound criticizes Hemingway’s notebook
writings.
“Your method
is obviously one which enables you to express what you have to
say in a very small compass.” -- Editor Max Perkins on Hemingway’s In Our Time after an early reading.
“This is to
tell you about a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who lives
in Paris, writes for the Transatlantic Review, and has
a brilliant future. I'd look him up right away. He's the real
thing.” -- Friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to Scribner
& Sons editor Max Perkins.
“He is candid;
he is highly skilled; he plants words precisely where he wishes;
he has moments of bare and nervous beauty; he is modern in manner
but not in vision; he is self-consciously virile; his talent
has contracted rather than expanded.” -- Author Virginia
Woolf in a front-page essay in the New York Herald Tribune
Books section.
“You’re even
bigger than I imagined.” -- Lauren Bacall, costar of the
movie version of To Have and Have Not, comments on Hemingway
after meeting him in Spain.
“All of you
young people who served in the war . . . are a lost generation
. . . You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves
to death.” -- Gertrude Stein commented to Hemingway about
the American expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s.
“Ernest found
time to do things most men only dream about . . . Ernest Hemingway
was the most positive life force I have ever encountered. I hate
anything negative, and I hate waste. In Hemingway, nothing was
wasted.” -- Marlene Dietrich speaks about her longtime friend.
|