Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

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

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.