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.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

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.

An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men.

I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.