The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

I am the worst judge of my books.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.