Great Throughts Treasury

"I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday."

"I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine."

"I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn"

"I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked."

"I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar "

"I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."

"I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living."

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."

"I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability."

"I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it."

"I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars."

"I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it."

"I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor."

"If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and ... if they had been any better, I should not have come."

"I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard."

"I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling."

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

"It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation."

"It is not a fragrant world."

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."

"It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all."

"It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in."

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

"It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way"

"It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it."

"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

"It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training."

"I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print."

"Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book."

"Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married."

"Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations."

"Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead."

"Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that."

"One would think a writer would be happy here "

"Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get."

"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."

"She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones."

"She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me."

"She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air."

"She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight."

"Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck."

"Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder."

"Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck."

"The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life."

"The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances."

"The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off."

"The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement."

"The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives."

"The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture."

"The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things."