You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.

Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.