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

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 French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be." Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

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