It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.

Intelligence alone can't make a good writer and style alone can't make a good writer - that is, not a really important or significant writer - but the two things together make a really good writer.

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that's one definition of a lady.

Good writing is rewriting.

If you happen to capture my imagination for some reason and I decide to write about you and you don't like what I wrote about you, which is entirely possible, then yes, I'm a dangerous writer.

I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.