It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this ge….

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 mouthfu….

The challenge is to write about real things magically..

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men..

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of wri….

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight..

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy..

If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will..

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in..

I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my man….

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday..

Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron..

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a….

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. Th….

They write them long because they can't write them short..

Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuen….

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people..

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come..

Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a….

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already..

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off..