The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.

If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.