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?

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

You can't have everything, even in California

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.