James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.

To say goodbye is to die a little.