[On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

But I don't give up; I forget why not.

The ones I like are ‘cheque’ and ‘enclosed.’

All I say is, nobody has any business to go around looking like a horse and behaving as if it were all right. You don't catch horses going around looking like people, do you?

All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.

[When asked what was the inspiration for most of her work:] Need of money, dear.