There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.

Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.