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

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

“The stores along Hollywood Boulevard were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible- it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.”

“I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.”