[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below
transcribed directly from audio]
*Having
no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of
rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel
for this Prize.*
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept
it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone
here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a
speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things
may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes
he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree
of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the
writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public
stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does
his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the
lack of it, each day.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for
something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has
never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with good
luck, he will succeed.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write
in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great
writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to
where no one can help him.
I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say
and not speak it.
¹
Due to ill health Hemingway was unable to deliver his Nobel Prize banquet
speech. John C. Cabot accepted the award and delivered the speech prepared by Ernest
Hemingway. The audio above was read and recorded by Ernest Hemingway at a later date.
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