As the style of Faulkner grew out of his rage--out of the impotence of his rage--the style of Hemingway grew out of the depth and ...nuance of his disenchantment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but ...do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It so happened that, a few weeks later, "Old Ernie" [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from li...terary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His st...yle in the wildest sense finally killed him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine a...nd salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on s...omeone to make them subtle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don't know my murderous impulses through C.G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Prous...t, Spain through Hemingway ... It's true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends, who also live all their experiences second-hand. What an age!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These two men, seemingly so different in their public attitudes--Faulkner hugged his private life, Hemingway made his into a natio...nal epic--responded similarly to inner needs. Self-destructive drinking was a phenomenon common to many American writers besides Hemingway and Faulkner; their commonality went far deeper. Both needed confusion, near disaster, and a reaching for depths before they became pumped up for work. Hemingway by the 1930s had put most of his best work behind him. He developed and peaked well before Faulkner, and the body of his achievement is far smaller as a result, although his influence was larger. Hemingway's turbulence was exhibited on a public scale. By comparison, Faulkner's turmoil was almost invis ible, except to family members and friends near him. He demanded his privacy with the obsession of a man who feared to give away anything which was not in his books. But because his resources were kept so close to his chest, so dammed up inside, he was more suitable for the long haul. He could incubate ideas, techniques, and energies without dissipating them in a great public display. And he could move at his own rate of development.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand, he was in deep depression and had written little of value for a long time. Scott Fitzg...erald, when he died, regarded by the world as a failure, was fighting his drink problem successfully, and was doggedly in the middle of The Last Tycoon, whose quality clearly confirms that his genius was intact. Who was the failure, who the hero? A writer is not an athlete, not a civic leader, not a politician; his personality may be flawed and his life a ruin, but the one fight that defines him is the fight to stay with his work, and not to betray it. On those terms, "poor Scott" was battling in the arena to the end, and his pathos is not the pathos of failure, but the pathos of greatness; and that greatness grows year by year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »