Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.
Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate.
I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.
You usually can tell when a writer is going down hill by the size of his liquor bill.
If you can’t write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.
I write of the wish that comes true – for some reason, a terrifying thought.
A guitar has moonlight in it.
I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called.
Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.
A home is not a museum. It doesn’t have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.
I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman.
That’s all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.
The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.
They threw me off the haytruck about noon.
A gun is like breath to a drowning man – it has to be drawn in haste.
Time is the only critic.
You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.
Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.
She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.
New York is not even a city, it’s a congerie of rotten villages.