Papa Hemingway Quotes

“Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do. Never confuse movement with action.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“Outside the gates of the finca, watching the passing rows of tin-roofed shacks which represented the residential section of San Francisco de Paula, I began to think about The Old Man and the Sea, and I realized it was Ernest’s counterattack against those who had assaulted him for Across the River. It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies bearing the likenesses of Dwight Macdonald and Louis Kronenberger and E.B. White, who in the midst of cackling, “Through! Washed Up! Kaput!” suddenly grab their groins and keel over. It is a rather elementary military axiom that he who attacks must anticipate the counterattack, but the critics, poor boys, would never make General Staff. As Ernest once said, “One battle doesn’t make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway

“Ernest had had it right: Man is not made for defeat. Man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“look, it doesn’t matter that I don’t write for a day or a year or ten years as long as the knowledge that I can write is solid inside me. But a day without that knowledge, or not being sure of it, is eternity.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“What do you think happens to a man going on sixty-two when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“Ernest had identified Cayetano as the prototype for Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“the matador Cayetano Ordoñez, who in the Twenties fought under the name Niña de la Palma; Cayetano and Ernest had been good friends and he had been the prototype for Pedro Romero, Lady Brett’s matador-lover, in The Sun Also Rises.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“I’ve seen every sunrise of my life. I rise at first light—the wars ruined my sleep, that and my thin eyelids—and I start by rereading and editing everything I have written to the point I left off. That way I go through a book I’m writing several hundred times. Then I go right on, no pissing around, crumbling up paper, pacing, because I always stop at a point where I know precisely what’s going to happen next.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“The Torino girl was Catherine Barkley,”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“You can have true affection for only a few things in your life,” he once told me, “and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won’t waste mine on something that can’t feel my affection.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“Listen, Hotch, whatever happens, whatever … she’s good and strong, but remember sometimes the strongest of women need help.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“daiquiri”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

“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.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir