The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

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

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

It is not a fragrant world.