I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.

I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.

She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea.

Chance is life's only certainty.

When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.

To catch the bad guys, you've got to think like a bad guy - and that's why all the best detectives have a dark side...

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to bethese days, when I got this call. I could hear the rainbattering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin’ wide in the turns.

The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern.

...they were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy)

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.