The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

May I wish for you the knowledge...that marriages do not take place, they are made by hand; that there is always an element of discipline involved; that however perfect the honeymoon, the time will come, however brief it is, when you wish she would fall downstairs and break a leg. This goes for her too. But the mood will pass, if you give it time.

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.