If you don’t leave, I’ll get somebody who will.
A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
They write them long because they can’t write them short.
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
A good title is the title of a successful book.
They don’t want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can’t use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.
Nice: meaning I’m going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them – to you.
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.
The challenge is to write about real things magically.
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
Shake your business up and pour it. I don’t have all day.