I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture

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.

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

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