Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.