- Martha Gellhorn: Past five minutes, I've watched you. I've watched you type pages and let them float into the wastebasket.
- Ernest Hemingway: Never crumple pages. Always let them float gently into the basket.
- Ernest Hemingway: Any writer who rips out his stuff and crumples it will go insane in a year, guaranteed.
- Ernest Hemingway: Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
- Ernest Hemingway: As a writer grows in public stature, he sheds his loneliness, and often his work deteriorates, for he does his work alone.
- Martha Gellhorn: We were good in war. And when there was no war, we made our own.
- Martha Gellhorn: The battlefield neither of us could survive was domestic life.
- Ernest Hemingway: [Voiceover of a letter he wrote] Beloved, I learned from you not to have the vanity to think that planes were looking for me and all bullets had my name on them. I am tired, and I wish I were with you.
- Ernest Hemingway: And if he's a good enough writer, he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
- Ernest Hemingway: So what do you do, sophisticated?
- Martha Gellhorn: What do I do? Lately, I've been seeing the world.
- Ernest Hemingway: How is the world?
- Ernest Hemingway: Let's see the review.
- Martha Gellhorn: What?
- Ernest Hemingway: Come, on Gellhorn. Every writer keeps one review.
- Martha Gellhorn: Well, you can blame Mrs. Roosevelt. She encouraged me to write it.
- Ernest Hemingway: [Voiceover of a letter he wrote] My dearest Marty, One thing you must know, love is infinitely more durable than hate. Last night I howled at the moon, and some poor wretched beast answered from the dark. Maybe he has a Marty, too? And so we howled together. The animal, and the man whom love has made an animal. Love, you poisoned my typewriter. How can I write with every key screaming? Since you left, I've had hangovers they could name battleships after. Today, I remember the heat of your naked skin. I am stinko deadly lonely. We must promise and pledge and swear out loud to the love-drunk gods on high that we will never leave each other again.
- Ernest Hemingway: You know how to make an entrance.
- Martha Gellhorn: Why? Jealous?
- Ernest Hemingway: All Cinderella had was a pumpkin.
- Martha Gellhorn: Cinderella needs a drink.
- Ernest Hemingway: Spain got my juices flowing Max, the work's good. I've got a great title.
- Maxwell Perkins: That's what editors like to hear.
- Ernest Hemingway: "For Whom the Bell Tolls".
- Charles Colebaugh: John Donne! "Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
- Martha Gellhorn: It's going to be his best novel.
- Maxwell Perkins: Believe me, Scribner's is interested, if you ever want to write a book.
- Martha Gellhorn: Really?
- Charles Colebaugh: Mm, you can't filch her, Perkins. I've got her locked up at Collier's. Stories are so good, we want more. Actually, you know, I wasn't sure that gals have the stuff to be war reporters.
- Martha Gellhorn: Well, women get bombed same as men.
- Ernest Hemingway: [grabs whiskey bottle] Yeah, I want to get bombed right now.
- Martha Gellhorn: I'm not going to write a piece on Hem's hunt for German submarines in the Carribean. Because it's ludicrous. That's why. In six months he hasn't found so much as a floating sauerbraten.