A.E. Hotchner > 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

“Why is it parents think they help their kids by pretending things are better than they are?”
― A. E. Hotchner

“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

“Why is it...that the good things that pop up almost always get clobbered by these miserable darn things that seem to choke out everything like stinkweed?”
― A. E. Hotchner

“And then there was the loving letter from my loving mother that I carry next to my heart.” Ernest took his billfold from his hip pocket and extracted a tattered slip of paper that he read from: “‘Ernest, I have received the inscribed copy of The Sun Also Rises, which you sent to me. Although as your Mother, I am pleased to hear that it is selling well, you have the doubtful honor of having produced one of the filthiest books of the year. Surely you must know some other words besides damn and bitch. I love you dear and still believe you will do something worthwhile to live after you.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

“But you believed in me against those tough odds. I want you to know, Hadley, you'll be the true part of any woman I write about. I'll spend the rest of my life looking for you”
― A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

“It has been emphasized that I have sought death all my life. If you have spent your life avoiding death as cagily as possible, but on the other hand taking no backchat from her and studying her as you would a beautiful harlot who could put you soundly to sleep forever with no problems and no necessity to work, you could be said to have studied her, but you have not sought her. Because you know among one or two other things that if you sought her, you would possess her, and from her reputation you know that she would present you with an incurable disease. So much for the constant pursuit of death. She’s just another whore.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

“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.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“You invent a novel from what you know, from all the things you’ve ever learned— and then you write it down, as if you’re telling the story to yourself or to your kids.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“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

“violoncello”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“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

“formidable than the others, not only as a writer but also as a prestigious member of the celebrity echelon of that time. His exploits—shooting wild beasts on safari,”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“They have sponsored sister camps in Florida, New York State, California, and North Carolina, and internationally in France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Hungary, and Africa.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“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

“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

“As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but more necessary.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“been promptly”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“Hotchner has also written for theater. His play The White House, starring Helen Hayes, was performed on Broadway, and in 1996 it was performed in the East Room of the White House for President and Mrs. Clinton and an audience of distinguished guests.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to 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

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

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

“No writer know the future of literature beyond what he’ll write the next morning, if that.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

“I once asked him if he kept journals or notes of any kind to supplement his memory. He said ‘no, always made things stick. Never kept notes or a journal. Just push the recall button and there it is. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t worth keeping.”
― A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

“Poverty is a disease that’s cured by the medicine of money.”
― A.E Hotchner

“Along with his writing career, Hotch’s accidental business venture with his longtime friend Paul Newman (whose first starring role was in The Battler, Hotchner’s first television play) has turned into one of the country’s surprising success stories.”
― A.E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway

“Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do.”
― 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

“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