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.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country

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.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.