Too many people realize at the end of their lives that they've taken for granted those who really love them.
Hemingway is a baby when he turns up in Paris, but he's an ambitious baby. And he has the talent. And he's there to stage his breakthrough. So many of the expats who were there at that time were there to do precisely that. It was an ambition-fueled town.
Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails.
And so with Hemingway's writing, he famously wrote to one of his publishers - he said, you don't need a high school education to enjoy my writing. And it's going to titillate the masses. I mean, anybody can relate to it, but the style is so revolutionary that it will titillate highbrow critics, which it did.
I spent an awful lot of time with Hemingway. And Hemingway had a remarkable ability to reach very noble goals through sometimes ignoble means.
Hemingway's talent was so outsized, that I feel like I can forgive him a lot of his trespasses to have achieved what he did achieve.
