Sunday, October 22, 2006

Never in the Papers

Ernest Hemingway in a 1950 letter to Robert Cantwell:

A man can’t stay home all the time and when he goes out if anything happens it is in the papers. It is never in the papers that you wake at first light and start working; nor that you serve your country … Nor that all the ambition you have ever had is to be the best American prose writer and work at it hard…

Quoted in Larry W. Phillips, ed., Ernest Hemingway on Writing (1984).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh, I like that. What an ambition to have. And to have fulfilled, at least in some opinions.