I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me.
From Raymond Chandler Speaking
Don't kid yourself. You're a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.
The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk bu...
If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive.If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.
A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now.
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency.
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
In a voice with half the steps missing.
He breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket.
You mean something happened to him? Her voice faded off into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.
She’s a nice girl. Not my type. You don’t like them nice? He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded wi...
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
Ich blickte den Revolver an, und der Revolver blickte mich an.
Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.
One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.
The same broken promise of a life of ease. I
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like...