Edgar Award Winners

"The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world."

"I never read contemporary fiction – with one exception: the works of Simenon concerned with Inspector Maigret."

"Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy."

"Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start."

"The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous."

"We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again."

"Our reputation has obviously preceded us. Don't worry shaking hands with a lesbian is perfectly safe. I have nothing against dykes Miss Cattrell, just wouldn't put my finger in one. The only disabilities that idiot has are both in his trousers. He's a prick and an arsehole."

"Did you know where the ice house was? No Well, what did you think the hillock was? A hillock probably."

"You've lived here for eight years, surely you must have explored the grounds. Do I look like someone who takes exercise? You're very slim. Well, I eat very little, drink neat spirits and smoke like a chimney. It does wonders for the figure, but leaves me gasping for breath halfway up the stairs."

"As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia."

"I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure."

"There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace."

"There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns — different states, if possible — and write each other letters once a year."

"We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose."

"The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape."

"When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables."

"Money costs too much."

"Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid."

"You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?" "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."

"I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves."

"An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing."

"The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake."

"Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth."

"They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted."

"Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean wouldn't cure."

"If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day."

"If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes."

"I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."

"They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, "Mike ...there was no reason.""

"I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of."

"The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant, there was something in their faces that didn't belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know. Could. From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of."

"I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book."

"He stood with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he was simply in idle conversation, but it wasn't like that at all. This was an instinctive gesture of survival, being in constant readiness for an attack. His head didn't turn and his eyes didn't seem to move, but I knew he saw us. I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck stiffening and I knew he felt the same way. Dog was meeting dog. Nobody knew it but the dogs and they weren't telling. He was bigger than I thought. The suggestion of power I had seen in his photographs was for real. When he moved it was with the ponderous grace of some jungle animal, dangerously deceptive, because he could move a lot faster if he had to. When we were ten feet away he pretended to see us for the first time and a wave of charm washed the cautious expression from his face and he stepped out to greet Dulcie with outstretched hand. But it wasn't her he was seeing. It was me he was watching. I was one of his own kind. I couldn't be faked out and wasn't leashed by the proprieties of society. I could lash out and kill as fast as he could and of all the people in the room, I was the potential threat. I knew what he felt because I felt the same way myself."

"I'm actually a softie. Tough guys get killed too early... I've got a full head of hair and don't wear eyeglasses."

"When I started the paperback market, there were only a few good writers, now the market's loaded... you don't know which one to take."

"The temperature was six below zero and it kept me dying on the spot because the blood coagulated and clotted in ugly smears of cloth and skin and the pain hadn't started yet, so when the little fat guy who saw my eyes open and still bright pulled me away from the carnage he was almost in the shock I was going into. Nobody would listen to him. He was a drunk. I was nearly dead. Sometimes the body responds to a stimulus that can't be explained. He got me upright. I walked woodenly, dyingly. I was sat in an old car. The fat man rolled down the windows. The blood stayed frozen. My hands were numb and I couldn't feel my feet. Idly, I wondered what frostbite was like. Breathing was a thing that was happening, but at a pace that said it could slow, then stop at any time. A dull, squeezing sensation of pain was beginning to gnaw on my insides and I knew that eventually, and very soon, it would grow into a terrible, devastating animal with an awful hunger and I would be eaten alive by it. I wanted to scream but nothing would come out."

"I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney."

"I'm a country boy. I hate New York. But that's where things happen, so I use it as a base for stories, I know enough about it. But I have to keep going back there."

"I learned a lot about transitions from reading Mickey Spillane. In the early Mike Hammer books, he hardly ever explained how Hammer got from one place to another, or wasted time setting up scenes elaborately. There were no slow dissolves in those books. They were all fast cuts, with each scene beginning right on the heels of the one before it. Since the books had enormous appeal to a generally unsophisticated audience, I would assume few readers had trouble following the action line, for all the abruptness of the transition."

"See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older."

"I've gotta keep writing. But where's the next step, where do you go? But at my age, you start to get tired. You're not full of piss and vinegar. The vinegar's all gone."

"The phone rang. It was a thing that had been sitting here, black and quiet like a holstered gun, unlisted, unknown to anybody, used only for local outgoing calls, and when it was triggered it had the soft, muted sound of a silenced automatic. The first ring was a warning sound. The second time would be death calling."

"That's why everyone hates Spillane — except his millions of readers and his banker!"

"I knew a couple of things... during the war years they came out with reprints of all the Dumas novels, Moby Dick, for the servicemen, and I saw this and believe me I'm a very sharp merchandiser, and I say this is the new marketplace for writing: original paperback books."

"I always wanted to have Mike Mazurki play Hammer... too bad he couldn't act."

"Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt."

"Hemingway hated me. I outsell him and he was steamed. One day he wrote a story for Bluebook berating me. So I'm going on a big TV show in Chicago and I don't get it, that's sour grapes... I mean if you can't say something nice about someone why say anything at all?"

"Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book."

"Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the cavern of Fifth Avenue and I looked up to where the sky started at the seventy-first floor of the Empire State Building. I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn't rain at all but the sweat of the city."

"I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it. My father was a good Irish saloon-keeper, my mother always said to him, 'Jack, how come you know everybody here' and he'd say, 'because I say hello'. I'm just like that, I've always been that way."