Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and...

The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

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.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a...

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.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.

Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.

I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was...

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

To say goodbye is to die a little.

It’s like this with us baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts….nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat out of a guy, they say, and some shyster...

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he...

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.

It’s goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can...

Fejezzük be ezt a beszélgetést. Túlságosan sok benne a felkiáltójel.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the...

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked...

Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So...

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and...

I’m killing time and it’s dying hard.

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.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the...

He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

I went out the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to...

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and...

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.

She poured us some more Scotch. It didn’t seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.

One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is every happy anywhere.

Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are...

But show business has always been like that – any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard—well, they wouldn’t be...

I believe…that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die...

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.”(A Qualified Farewell)

One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.

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...

Tall, aren’t you?” she said. “I didn’t mean to be.”Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother...

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

You’re broke, eh?”I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror...

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.