She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

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

There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

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

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

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Women were the reason I became a monk - and, ah, the reason I switched back.

...a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

She doesn’t like you, McNab.“I knoooow. I find that really attractive in a woman.

The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority...

It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to satisfy those that follow.

My strength is basically my get off. It is overpowering. I can get after the quarterback on first, second and third down. I pride myself on being an every down guy.

Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men cando." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.