I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.
You like it in jail?””It’s not too bad. You don’t meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?
You like it in jail?It’s not too bad. You don’t meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?
You like it in jail?”It’s not too bad. You don’t meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?
Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get…
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
You’re broke, eh?”I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.
A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet.
You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.
One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is every happy anywhere.
Tall, aren’t you?” she said. “I didn’t mean to be.”Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
It’s like this with us baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts….nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.
He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime. (I’ll Be Waiting)
The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
She poured us some more Scotch. It didn’t seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.
A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.
His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.
The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detach
The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently he can’t be sure. When he can no longer throw his high hard one he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He just doesn’t walk off the mound and weep.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.