Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears - those you have learnt the most from? Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymous Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora - it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn't an old dull question. It is a good but solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious. "I am always reading books - as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply." - Ernest Hemingway, from The Paris Review Interviews Vol 1. Photo: Earl Theisen/Getty Images https://www.instagram.com/p/BoiW9Fzhg33/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=142x0hvn6syb3