A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.