The more you reason the less you create.
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
California, the department store state.
The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.
All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.
If you believe in an idea, you don’t own you, it owns you.
Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.
You can’t tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper.
When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.
I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.