Who said “The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right…”?

“Lawyers I suppose were children once.”

“Every law is an infraction of liberty.”

“Laws, like houses, lean on one another.”

“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.”

“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”

“A really good detective never gets married.”

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

“"Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off."”

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.”

“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”