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

The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

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

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.

The more you reason the less you create.

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.