 The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication. |
| It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country. |
| 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 the tricks and has nothing to say. |
| A really good detective never gets married. |
| She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. |
| The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. |
| The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement. |
| At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. |
| Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck. |
| The more you reason the less you create. |
| I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it. |
| Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations. |
| The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. |
| He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. |
| I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes. |
| Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency. |
| From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. |
| An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. |
