“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”

“Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.”

“It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.”

“There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.”

“James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that?”

“She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term I'll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”

“had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.”