Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

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.

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?