The most popular feature of the Timeless Hemingway web site is the Hemingway Quote Finder. Since 1999, quote source requests have been sent in from people of all walks of life: professors, film production companies, government officials, and authors. However, many of the inquiries I receive do not originate with Hemingway. So here they are (drum roll please) — the top five misattributed Hemingway quotations.
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
[The early Hemingway did not believe that bullfighting was a sport. For him it was a tragedy. He expresses this feeling in his October 20, 1923 article titled "Bull Fighting a Tragedy," reprinted in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, edited by William White. Hemingway reiterates his beliefs regarding the tragedy of bullfighting in his 1932 book, Death in the Afternoon.]
"For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
["For Whom the Bell Tolls" is a phrase from John Donne's Meditation XVII in his book, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Hemingway chose the following portion of the meditation as an epigraph to his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls: "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."]
"Oak Park is a place of broad lawns and narrow minds."
[This statement accurately describes Hemingway's feelings for his native Oak Park, but a source has never been found for the remark. Likely something written in a piece of personal correspondence, the statement is absent from Hemingway's Selected Letters.]
"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
[This quotation is most often attributed to Mark Twain, though a growing number of quotation aficionados have attempted to put it under Hemingway's pen. On a visit to San Francisco in July of 1937, Hemingway told reporters: "Say, this is great! After frying in New York, stewing down in Florida and sweltering in Los Angeles this is something like summer weather. I can't for the life of me see why anybody would ever move out of San Francisco, particularly in the summer time." This is the closest Hemingway ever came to saying that "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."]
"If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."
[Not surprising that this one gets attributed to Hemingway considering the amount of letters he wrote in his lifetime. This quote has also been attributed to Cicero, Voltaire, and Mark Twain. The original thought may belong to French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who wrote in his Lettres Provinciales (1657): "I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter." Another translation for the quotation reads: "I have made this letter a rather long one, only because I didn't have the leisure to make it shorter."]
