The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it.
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don’t mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren’t any of those.
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.