Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.