I haven't any sort of plans for the future but I reckon things will work out in some manner.

I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.

You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one.

It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.

When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around-bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Sam Spade

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.