“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”

“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?”

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”

“I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.”

“The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.”

“She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”

“Ohls showed the motor-cycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night’s hard rain hadn’t even dented.”