A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.

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

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

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.

To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.

I never wanted to marry anyone like my father; I always preferred those more shoddy.

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.