He actually wrote his English publisher a letter containing the sentence, "Don't think I worry about money, because I don't."

17. He was astonished to be informed that another mystery writer, one distinguished chiefly by his ingenuity, did not enjoy the act of writing. Instantly, it explained to him why he had never been able to read the man's books. Still reeling, he wrote a friend, "The actual writing is what you live for."

18. Throughout his life, he endured a spectacular, even brutal, loneliness.

19. Sometimes in restaurants he was so funny that the people at adjoining tables stopped talking to listen to what he was saying.

20. When J.B. Priestly, author of Angel Pavement and Festival at Farbridge, came to California and held a dinner party in his honor, he failed to appear. It had never occurred to him that his presence might be any more crucial than anyone else's.

21. Upon discovering that it had been, he apologized but did not feel guilty or embarrassed.

22. Neither did he feel guilty or embarrassed when the news of his botched suicide attempt--the bullet did considerable damage to the bathroom but none to the drunken widower of two months holding the gun--appeared in newspapers all over the country. Some of the letters he received as a result of the publicity struck him as incredibly silly.

23. He understood that he was both romantic and sentimental.

24. After his first four books, he thought Philip Marlow was romantic and sentimental, too, and decided that on the whole Marlowe was probably too good to be satisfied with working as a private detective.

25. He almost always knew what he was doing, even while making serious mistakes.

26. The year after his wife died, he was ejected from the Connaught Hotel for having a woman in his room, whereupon he moved to the Ritz.

27. He was unfailingly generous to young writers.

28. He wrote, "Plausibility is largely a matter of style." Later in the same essay, he added, "It takes an awful lot of technique to compensate for a dull style, although it has been done, especially in England."

29. He never won an award. He never networked or traded one favor for another. These things would have appalled him. Had he been offered the Nobel Prize, he would have turned it down because (1) acceptance would involve going to Sweden, dressing up in a tuxedo and giving a speech, and (2) the Nobel Prize had been given to so many second-rate writers that the effort involved in Point One far exceeded its distinction.

30. While a guest in the Stephen Spender household, he imagined that he would soon marry his host's wife, Natasha Spender.

31.