Today has been spent researching and preparing for my college classes which I must go teach in just a few minutes. My office is trashed. I’ve got to get myself organized. I’m spending too much time looking for stuff! Anyway, in today’s entry I wanted to share the fruits of my research this morning: some quotes of Ernest Hemingway that I gleaned from Hatcher’s book, Papa Hemingway. Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy are without a doubt my favorite writers. I’ve read everything in print by both authors–and more than once. It was because of a reading of “A Clean Well Lighted Place” in my college 102 class that I became an English major and plunged headlong into literature and into writing.

“Every man’s life ends the same way, and it is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another.”

“[W]riting is the only thing that makes me feel that that I’m not wasting my time sticking around.”

“Writing at its best is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone, and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity or the lack of it each day.”

“How the hell can you bleed over your own personal tragedies when you’re a writer? You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terrible before they can write seriously. But once you get the hurt and can handle it, consider yourself lucky—that is what there is to write about and you have to be as faithful to it as a scientist is faithful to his laboratory. You can’t cheat or pretend. You have to excise the hurt honestly.”

“Life is short and the years run away and you must do everything you really want to.”

“Only three things in my life I’ve really liked to do—hunt, write and make love.”