Bicky

“When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. . . .
The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordi-nary qualities. Perry Mason is the perfect detective because he has the intellectual approach of the juridical mind and at the same time the restless quality of the adventurer who won’t stay put. I think he is just about perfect. So let’s not have any more of that phooey about
“as literature my stuff still stinks.” Who says so—William Dean Howells?

Raymond Chandler to Erle Stanley Gardner, 1946”
― Richard B. Schwartz, Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction

“Everything, he decided, was almost unbearably sad. Life was wonderful, but nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and the world was beautiful, but nobody looked at it except tourists.”
― Craig Rice, Trial by Fury

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.”
― Harlan Coben, The Boy from the Woods