All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

I spent most of my dough on booze, broads and boats and the rest I wasted.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice.

It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.

Using adverbs is a mortal sin.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

Try not to write the parts that people skip.

Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write.

She loved him. She loved Ryder Davis. She loved his stupid face and his dumb smile and his idiotic biceps.

and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth

I’m getting the feeling that you two don’t like me. - Kristy

Oblige me by telling me where I am.""That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.

Necessity does the work of courage.

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

I pray everyday, all the time. Prayer is when you are actually experiencing a conversation with divine intelligence.

We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.

According to deontology it is wrong to kill an innocent human being, period.

In God we trust; all others bring data.