A Moveable Feast
First published 1964 · English · 256 pages
- Novels
- Historical fiction
- Biography and memoir
A memoir of Hemingway's early years as a struggling young writer in Paris in the 1920s, published after his death. He describes cafes, cheap rooms, hunger, walks along the Seine and the discipline of learning to write. Along the way he sketches portraits of other figures of the time, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald, sometimes sharply. Memory has shaped the book, so it is best read as a personal and artful recollection rather than strict history. It remains a loved portrait of a city and a young artist's life.
Quotes
If 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.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.