Wealth management.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” 1926
I am getting to know the rich.
—Ernest Hemingway, to Mary Colum,
lunch with Max Perkins
The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.
—Mary Colum, to Hemingway, ibid.
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
—Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936
If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it into a book would you mind cutting my name?
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
—Fitzgerald, to Hemingway, correspondence, 1936
They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)
—Fitzgerald, notes
Fitzgerald had said, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway had replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
—Edmund Wilson, footnote explaining Fitzgerald’s note,
The Crack-Up, 1945
Everyone knows the famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway refers to it in his story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Fitzgerald records it in his notebook) in which, to Fitzgerald’s remark, “The very rich are different from us,” Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” It is usually supposed that Hemingway had the better of the exchange and quite settled the matter. But we ought not to be too sure. The novelist of a certain kind, if he is to write about social life, must always risk a certain ambiguity in his social attitudes. The novel took its rise from a sense of a disrupted society and from the interpenetration of classes, and the novelist must still live by his sense of class differences and must be absorbed by them, as Fitzgerald was, even though he despise them, as Fitzgerald did.
—Lionel Trilling, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,”
his review of The Crack-Up, 1945
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
—William Gibson, Count Zero, 1986
