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.

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

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.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk." —