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.

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

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.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.