...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.

I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.

Feed the lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.

I once knew a man who stole a Ferris Wheel.

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.

Free is a man who has no desires.

Wild Bill was a strange character. In person he was about six feet and one inch in height. He was a Plains-man in every sense of the word.

Those who create are hard of heart.

It was a nice day, and I don't mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else.

There is no perfect spaghetti sauce. There are perfect spaghetti sauces.

Trying to write while I'm distracted definitely doesn't work for me. I'm also a compulsive saver of my files, so every writing session ends with me emailing what I've written to myself, just in case.

No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.

For every door the computers have closed they have opened a new one.

In New York alone, there was an average of more than 300 campus fires per year between 1997 and 2000, with roughly 160 of them annually in dormitories.