Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

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

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.