The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

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

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.

I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.

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?

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.