I’m in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
LA doesn’t have the heart of a paper cup.
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.
All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
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.