They were a wonderful set of burglars, the people who were running San Francisco when I first came to town in 1923, wonderful because, if they were stealing, they were doing it with class and style.

Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you - like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.

Beware of people whose halos are on too tight.

Well, there's a Book that says we're all sinners and I at least chose a sin that's made quite a few people happier than they were before they met me, a sin that's left me with very little time to consider other extremely popular moral misdemeanors, like usury, intolerance, bearing false tales, extortion, racial bigotry, and the casting of that first stone.

[On entering the restaurant business:] Food has the dubious advantage of being legitimate, and one's customers somehow manage to live longer without sex than food, if you call that living.

It doesn't take much to produce a good merchant of cash-and-carry love: just courage, an infinite capacity for perpetual suspicion, stamina on a 24-hour-a-day basis, the deathless conviction that the customer is always wrong, a fair knowledge of first and second aid, do-it-yourself gynecology, judo - and a tremendous sense of humor.

Romance without finance is a nuisance. Few men value free merchandise. Let the chippies fall where they may.