(1899–1961)
U.S. novelist and journalist“Poor old Black Dog. I miss him. In the early morning when I work, he’s not there on the kudu skin beside the typewriter; and in the afternoon when I swim, he’s not hunting lizards beside the pool; and in the evenings when I sit in my chair to read, his chin isn’t resting on my foot. I miss Black Dog as much as I miss any friend I ever lost.”
more infosource: Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, by A. E. Hotchner (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 243.
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category: dog, memory, mourning, pet, pet loss
medium: Memoir
“A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.”
more infosource: blurb on front cover of Cyril Connolly’s book The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981).
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category: blurb, book, book review, praise
medium: Book review
“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.”
more infosource: describing F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 125.
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category: butterfly, F. Scott Fitzgerald, pattern, talent
medium: Memoir
“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
more infosource: A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 18.
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category: food, happiness, oyster, wine
medium: memoir
“I had learned already 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.”
more infosource: A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 58.
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category: creative process, writing
medium: memoir
“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
more infosource: A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 86.
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category: humor, joke, philosophy, school of life, seed, soil
medium: memoir
“Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.”
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 40.
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category: pencil, productive, routine, tool, work, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 18 of The Paris Review, 1958.
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
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Ernest Hemingway