Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.

Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.

This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.

Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.