Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on the circulation and you know what circulation depends on.