They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.

They write them long because they can't write them short.

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.