It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.

We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.

There are so may ways to kills yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well: idiots! It's simple, I'd drown myself... Why be in misery at the last?

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely where love came to them. An abyss would open in the principal shopping street of every town.

Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable, would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my old cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.