A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound—afte...
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 actually knows how...
Платих и се отбих в един бар, за да изсипя чашка коняк върху нюйоркската пържола. Защо ли и викаха нюйоркска? Доколкото си спомням стоманените плоскости се произвеждат в Детройт. Излязох да вдъхна мал...
You’re a full portion of what I don’t like,’ she said. ‘Get out of my way.’ I didn’t move. She didn’t move. We were both sitting down – and not even close to each other.
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things lik...
Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying class, crushed against ste...
This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time- putting thumb marks on the new jackets. Nobody paid any at...
They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They
Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay b...
Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something al...
The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face.‘What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?’‘There are ladies present.
She was a tall, seedy, sad-eyed blonde who had once been a policewoman and had lost her job when she married a cheap little check bouncer named Johnny Horne, to reform him. She hadn’t reformed him, bu...
She had eyes like strange sins.
She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair. Her smile was tentative, but could...
Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and p...
Los jóvenes que quieren que uno les enseñe a escribir no hacen lo que hago yo [tachar, corregir, reescribir]. Esperan que todo lo que escriben sea publicado tal cual. No están dispuestos a sacrificar...
I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination,
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 championship tournament game between Gortcha-koff and Meninkin, s...
I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me—and I didn't think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.
He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job.She brightened up very suddenly. Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married.I guess he forgot, I s...