If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

With knowledge there is no hope,... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.

I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.

It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.