The epigram everyone quotes turns up in print in 1971. What Hemingway actually wrote, in Death in the Afternoon in 1932, was addressed to a woman who had called his story sad: “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” Four decades of shortening produced the version that fits on a poster, and lost the person he was answering.