“This time [Hemingway] discovered God, a Creator. . . It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.” -- William Faulkner comments on The Old Man and the Sea.

“I think you are more intelligent than this mss . . . I want to say: me frien Hem, kin knock yew over the ropes; and then I want to see the punch delivered. I dont want gentle embraces in the middle of the ring.” -- Poet Ezra Pound criticizes Hemingway’s notebook writings.

“Your method is obviously one which enables you to express what you have to say in a very small compass.” -- Editor Max Perkins on Hemingway’s In Our Time after an early reading.

“This is to tell you about a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris, writes for the Transatlantic Review, and has a brilliant future. I'd look him up right away. He's the real thing.” -- Friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to Scribner & Sons editor Max Perkins.

“He is candid; he is highly skilled; he plants words precisely where he wishes; he has moments of bare and nervous beauty; he is modern in manner but not in vision; he is self-consciously virile; his talent has contracted rather than expanded.” -- Author Virginia Woolf in a front-page essay in the New York Herald Tribune Books section.

“You’re even bigger than I imagined.” -- Lauren Bacall, costar of the movie version of To Have and Have Not, comments on Hemingway after meeting him in Spain.

“All of you young people who served in the war . . . are a lost generation . . . You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.” -- Gertrude Stein commented to Hemingway about the American expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s.

“Ernest found time to do things most men only dream about . . . Ernest Hemingway was the most positive life force I have ever encountered. I hate anything negative, and I hate waste. In Hemingway, nothing was wasted.” -- Marlene Dietrich speaks about her longtime friend.