A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

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