A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.
I’m all done with hating you. It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
She was kind of girl who’d eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
Tall, aren’t you? I didn’t mean to be.
She had eyes like strange sins.
The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.
Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it.
Dames lie about anything – just for practice.
The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.
All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.