But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

Source: quoted in Lillian Ross's profile of Hemingway, which first appeared in the The New Yorker (13 May 1950). The profile was later published as a short book titled Portrait of Hemingway (1961). Variant: / I started out very quiet and I beat Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.