“Deal with him, Hemingway!”

“It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenesuntil they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drovehim to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in worksof genius?”

“And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?”

“We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.”

“I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.”

“Ornate language tended to unsettle him. Passages from nineteenth-century novels might glow like hot coals or squirm like heaps of snakes. In fact, he tried not to read anything written before the First World War. Hemingway made a good cutoff point. Hemingway's sentences were a nice deep blue, and they mostly held still, like stalks of wheat on a windless day.(p18)”