The City is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the exterior halls, could not even get his finger on one tiny, tiny lever.

When people are collecting gold they aren't doing business. ... Gold is constipation: even bankruptcy is more fluid. Gold isn't wealth: positions in markets are wealth.

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.

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.

A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.