I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Mysteries are irritated by facts.

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

A cop is a human creature born stupid and raised in stupidity.

There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.

When I read it Tough Guys Don't Dance, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one's passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.