A gun is like breath to a drowning man--it has to be drawn in haste..

O.K." "Gee I'm glad." "Me too. I'm so sick of hot dogs and beer and apple pie with cheese on the side I could heave it all in the river." "You'll lov….

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….

You usually can tell when a writer is going down hill by the size of his liquor bill..

If you have to do it, you can do it..

If your writing doesn`t keep you up at night, it won`t keep anyone else up either"..

When it’s too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about….

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character wou….

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..

I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought..

Time is the only critic..

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….

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel..

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is ….

Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing his car, that's larceny..

New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages..

A guitar has moonlight in it..

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..

They threw me off the haytruck about noon..

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip..