“If the book’s bad enough, they’ll publish it, and if it’s bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it’ll sell.”

“Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary.”

“I have wrote my name in hell,” Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.”

“Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.”

“My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won’t need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.”

“Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to.”

“She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day.”

“He’s America in action — opposed to quality.”

“Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he’ll never write again. That’s our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you’re married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn’t in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.”

“And yet Curt’s a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that’s all.”

“If the book’s bad enough, they’ll publish it, and if it’s bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it’ll sell.”