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.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.