I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.

Nothing is more cruel to the young than to tell them that the world is made for youth.

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.

If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever.