Paul Hendrickson > Quotes

“He moves through the white glare of a Key West afternoon in that curious, rolling, cantilevered, ball-of-the-foot, and just-off-kilter gait that suggests a kind of subtle menace. He’s on dense and narrow and aromatic streets bearing people’s first names—Olivia, Petronia, Thomas, Emma, Angela, Geraldine. He’s Tom Sawyer on a Saturday in Hannibal, tooting like a steamboat, rid now of Aunt Polly’s clutches, left to his own devices, not to show back home until the sun is slanting in long bars. He’s Jake Barnes on a spring morning in Paris, when the horse chestnut trees are in bloom in the Luxembourg gardens. Jake is expert at shortcutting down the Boul’Mich’ to the rue Soufflot, where he hops on the back platform of an S bus, and rides it to the Madeleine, and then jumps off and strolls along the boulevard des Capucines to l’Opéra, where he then turns in at his building and rides the elevator up to his office to read the mail and sit at the typewriter and prepare a few cables for his newspaper across the Atlantic. “There was the pleasant early-morning feel of a hot day,” is the way Jake’s creator, living in this different region of light, had said it at the start of chapter 5 of The Sun Also Rises.”
― Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

“He liked to say that what makes literature is “inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might remember.”
― Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

“What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can’t write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.”
― Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

“all you need to do is consult an 1872 congressional hearing on the Klan quixotically entitled Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. The multi-volume document makes scary reading, even now.”
― Paul Hendrickson, Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

“One perception of the way he lived his life has always had the capacity to stir up complex things, to make us uneasy, defensive, secretly troubled about our own less glamorous and more sedentary lives.

A characteristic Hemingway letter: the streams of loose syntax, the blunt emotion.

The way I see all this is that part of what we do in this life is conscious. And the rest of it is unconscious. Maybe this is the best we can ever say.”
― Paul Hendrickson, Hemingways Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 - 1961