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

I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful.

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

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

If you believe in an idea, you don't own you, it owns you.