Literary Birthday – 21 July – Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was born 21 July 1899, and died 2 July 1961.
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
- The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
- One cat just leads to another.
- We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
- 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.
- You know what makes a good loser? Practice.
- Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
- Never use slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.
- You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
- It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
- Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
- All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
Ernest Hemingway was an American author and journalist. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. He is the author of The Sun Also Rises
, A Farewell To Arms
, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man And The Sea
. His economical prose style had a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century. According to Britannica: ‘He wished to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect.’ This style changed the writing of a generation of authors. Hemingway’s writing includes themes of love, war, travel, expatriation, wilderness, and loss. Always slightly eccentric, he used to write standing up. While living in Paris as a foreign correspondent he made friends with other artists and writers who would shape his literary life. Among them were Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. His classic novella, The Old Man And The Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself with his favourite shotgun in the early morning hours of 2 July 1961.
Recommended reads:
- 27 Gems On Writing From Ernest Hemingway
- How To Write Like Hemingway With These 10 Easy Tips
- Between Friends: Writing Advice From Hemingway To Fitzgerald
- How Ernest Hemingway Changed The Writing Landscape
Source for Image: Lloyd Arnold, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ErnestHemingway.jpg
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2 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 21 July – Ernest Hemingway”
My absolute favourite male writer of all time. Vaya con Dios, Papa.
It moves me every time looking at his words.
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