"I'm killing time and it's dying hard."
- Raymond Chandler
"You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the wo..."
"One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere."
"Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be."Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to h..."
"Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean."
"The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me."
"I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to ..."
"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..."
"But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."
"Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness."