Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.

Shake your business up and pour it. I haven't got all day.

Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.