I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

If you cannot stand a spoon upright in the cup, then the coffee is too weak.

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

I think persistence in the face of adversity is an essential part of a writer’s job description. If you don’t care enough about it to avoid being easily disheartened that way, you really should be doing something else.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.