Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.