The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face. ‘What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?’ ‘There are la… - Raymond Chandler

It could have been a beautiful friendship,” Beifus said with a sigh. “Except for the ice pick, of course.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot dangling.