“Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.”
- July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961
- American
- Novelist, poet, journalist
- Wrote masterpieces such as “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Farewell to Arms,” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954
Quote
“Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.”
Explanation
In this quote, Hemingway uses a dramatic scenario—a crash in a burning aircraft—to emphasize the crucial lessons that come from facing extreme adversity. For the trained writer, the experience of life-or-death situations teaches them things about human nature, fear, and resilience that cannot be learned in any other way. However, Hemingway also points out that the usefulness of these lessons depends entirely on survival. This connects to a broader theme in Hemingway’s work: survival with honor, an ideal that demands not just physical endurance but a moral integrity that transcends the harshness of life’s struggles. The concept of honor, while perhaps old-fashioned or outmoded in a modern context, remains essential to the writer’s identity and craft.
Hemingway himself was no stranger to dangerous situations. His life, marked by experiences like World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and his time as a journalist covering conflicts, mirrored the extreme circumstances he describes in this quote. The lessons he learned from these experiences were integral to his ability to create characters who, much like the writer in this scenario, were forced to confront not only physical survival but also their moral decisions in times of crisis. In works like A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s characters embody the struggle to survive with honor, often facing profound challenges where their integrity and sense of duty are tested.
In the modern world, this quote can be interpreted in terms of personal challenges and the moral dilemmas that writers, as well as people in general, face today. While we may not all experience life-or-death situations like a crash, the concept of survival—both physical and moral—remains as relevant as ever. Whether dealing with personal crises, social issues, or even the pressures of creative work, the question of how we endure with honor is one that continues to shape our experiences. The writer, like anyone facing adversity, must decide how they will navigate challenges and how the lessons learned will be applied—not just to their work, but to their lives.
