Fiction works because a part of the mind forgets that it’s fiction while we’re reading it.
You think he just died of natural causes?This is New York. Murder’s a natural cause in this city.
When I decided in my mid-fifties to return to a hobby I’d abandoned twenty years earlier, I didn’t know what sort of a collector I’d be. As a boy I’d started out collecting everything, then narrowed m...
Wait a minute. Can a general worldwide collector care more about some countries than others? Is there a Most-Favored Nation clause in his contract with philately? Ah. Wouldn’t you know it? Now I’ve go...
The Players are gentlemen, he’d intoned, pretending to be actors. The Lambs are actors, pretending to be gentlemen. And the Friars—the Friars are neither, pretending to be both.
Take care. It seems to me that people have only been saying that phrase on parting for the past few years or so. All of a sudden everyone started to say it, as if the whole country abruptly recognized...
Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.
So many changes, eating away at the world like water dripping on a rock.
Perhaps I’ve just mounted the initial stamp on a page that used to be blank. Perhaps I’ve filled the final space on that page. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps I’ve added a fifteenth stamp to a...
People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.
Oh, I don’t believe in anything. I especially don’t believe in astrology. Know why?Why?Because I’m a Saggitarius, and every Sagittarius knows astrology is a lot of hooey.
Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in.
It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn’t scratch it.
Imaginative persons could probably find interesting things to do with handcuffs and a nightstick.
I haven't got anything against cats. I haven't got anything against elk either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep one in the store so I'll have a place to hang my hat.
He's got a new BMW now, thanks to the Galaxy. He can't spell it, but he can drive it like crazy.
Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our...
Breakfast was always a slab of cold black toast and a cup of thick black coffee. Lunch and dinner were always the same—a tin plate piled with a suspicious pilaff, mostly rice with occasional bits of l...
After all, doesn’t part of philately’s attraction lie in the grip it holds on us? It is our eagerness to locate and acquire and add to our albums that testifies to our commitment to the hobby. If we w...
What time is it?Time?Time.Oh, She said. A quarter to four. Mr. Markham, something terrible has happened.She didn't have to tell me that. Something perfectly dreadful had happened, by God. Someone had...