Completed Hemingway's A Moveable Feast last night

What a great and entertaining book from a great author. A previously stated A Moveable Feast is a collection of memoirs written by Hemingway about his life in Paris during the early 1920's. The book was the last he would write and it was released following his death by double-barrel shotgun blast to the forehead (his previous attempt at suicide by walking into a spinning plane propeller was stopped due to being physically restrained).

I'd like to share some interesting quotes from the book:

"I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always stop when there was something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

"Anderson's stories were too good to make happy conversation. I was prepared to tell Miss Stein (Gertrude) how strangely poor his novels were, but this would have been bad too because it was criticizing one of her loyal supporters. When he wrote a novel finally called Dark Laughter, so terribly bad, silly and affected that I could not keep from criticizing it in a parody (The Torrents of Spring), Miss Stein was very mad."

"Are you a gentleman?" (Hemingway)
"Naturally. I have held His Majesty's commission." (Ford Maddox Ford)
"It's very complicated," I said (H). "Am I a gentleman?"
"Absolutely not," Ford said.
"Then why are you drinking with me?" (H)
"I'm drinking with you because you are a promising young writer. As a fellow writer in fact." (FMF)
"Good for you," I said. (H)
"You might be considered a gentleman in Italy," Ford said magnanimously.

"We never argued about such things because I kept my mouth shut about things I did not like."

Of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Scott's wife Zelda: "He would start to work and as soon as he was working Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party."

"All things truly wicked start from innocence."

What book is next? Well it just so happens I picked a copy of Richard Bachman's lost book Blaze last week at the grocery store. Bachman is, of course, Stephen King and King wrote a few books as Richard Bachman early in his career. The Bachman books have a different feel and style to them, especially the ones that were written early in King's career (Rage, The Long Walk, Road Work and The Running Man). King also wrote Thinner as Bachman was but outed as Bachman after the book was published. In addition King wrote The Regulators as Bachman but it was clear by this point that King was indeed Bachman and there was no reason to continue to pretend he was not.

Blaze, though, is somewhat different. Blaze was written during the Bachman years but shelved because King though the book was not good enough to print. Still, in my "stack-o-books-to-read" I've got a lot of a King and very few classical authors. My feeling is I should add some other "greats" into the mix. We'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one.