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.
I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar – that’s wonderful.
Two very simple rules: A. You don’t have to write. B. You can’t do anything else The rest comes of itself.
Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.
If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.
I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.
One would think a writer would be happy here – if a writer is every happy anywhere.
An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.