Dickens: You are very manly.

Hem: Yes, I hunt and drink and am constantly fighting in and writing about war.

Dickens: I’m more of a city guy. I write about London, but the really crappy, dark, and depressing London.

Hem: Orphans and what not?

Dickens: Exactly.

Hem: Oliver is your most popular book.

Dickens: Oliver Twist. Oliver is something different. That’s a musical. I did not write the song “Food, Glorious Food”. People think that the Oliver I wrote is the musical Oliver. I just wrote the book.

Hem: I write in short, declarative sentences.

Dickens: I write longer sentences, like “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” and then there’s a lot more to that line, but people only know the first part.

Hem: Great Sexpectations would be a good name for a porno.

Dickens: It would probably be better than the Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke adaptation.

[Hemingway laughs, and drinks a bottle of scotch. He shoots a buffalo.]

Dickens: Towards the end of your life, you looked like a drunken Santa Claus, and lived in Cuba for a while.

Hem: You were accused of anti-Semitism. Probably deserved it.

Dickens: And you shot yourself in the head with a shotgun in Idaho.

Hem: We sure know a lot about each other.

[Hemingway shoots a grizzly. Dickens touches the tip of his top hat as a compliment on a good shot.]