Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

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.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.