I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sir: Between buccaneers, no ceremony; I take your dry goods, and in return I send you pimento; therefore, we are now even. I enter...tain no resentment.... Nothing can intimidate us; we run the same fortune, and our maxim is that the goods of this world belong to the strong and valiant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The ...other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Or else I thought her supernatural; As though a sterner eye looked through her eye... On this foul world in its decline and fall, On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry, Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty, Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Their holders have always seemed to me like a woman who should undertake at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense o...f advertising it, while she had never spent an hour in learning its use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and turned the sea in...to dry land; and the waters were divided. The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »