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

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

They write them long because they can't write them short.

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.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.