Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.

We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.