There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

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.

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

One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.