If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.
I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.
I knew damn well I would never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you are intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are s...
He wants awfully to be inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.
Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.
Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to...
all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningl...
You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you can learn how...
You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quiet sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist i...
Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreadin...
There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.
The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch...
Of course people couldn't help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.
Never love a wild thing... you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree....
My yardstick is how somebody treats me.
Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.
I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.
I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms—flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, w...
Even for those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can't refuse: Dom Perignon and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that display...