I said: Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this. Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish.
Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink an...
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.
Mr. Cobb was my escort, she said. Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could beco...
To say goodbye is to die a little.
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in da...
A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet.
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 it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us...
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.
Intentan ser honestos, pero la honestidad es un arte. El mal escritor es deshonesto sin saberlo, y el escritor más o menos bueno puede que sea deshonesto porque no sabe sobre qué ser honesto.
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 let the chips fall where t...
Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really e...
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 show hotel help a clear photo and...
There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebo...
She was a cute as a washtub.
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
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.()
The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. I...