Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.
The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.
The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.
And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.
The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.
The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.
Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it
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