I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part nigger. You'd hate to be me - Raymond Chandler

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.