It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.
Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool, a clever fool – perhaps – but a fool just the same.
There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.
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.