If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

The streets were dark with something more then night.