Notable Quotes: On Life and Writing by Ernest Hemingway

The other day I posted an analysis of a Hemingway short story, “Now I Lay Me” which was based on an event in his personal life.  Then I came across this quote.  Now this quote doesn’t quite fit the short story since the quote calls for biography while the story is fiction, or as Hemingway calls it, “invention,”  Still, that short story was so autobiographical that I think the quote is warranted. 

 There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

       -Ernest Hemingway