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

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

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

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

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.

The streets were dark with something more then night.