I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops . . . I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.

You can't tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

But nothing seems to do any good.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.