The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.
It is not a fragrant world.
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
I do a great deal of research – particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don’t want it any more.
But nothing seems to do any good.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.
It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.
I’m killing time and it’s dying hard.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
If you don’t leave, I’ll get somebody who will.
A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
They write them long because they can’t write them short.
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
A good title is the title of a successful book.
They don’t want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can’t use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.