The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia... ...Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death." The League of Frightened Men