She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.

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

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.