She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.

If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

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.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.