From The End of Mr. Garment, by Vincent Starrett:

***
"His best work![sic]" said Curly Pope sententiously, "was his first. He has never equalled it."
He knew nothing whatever about it, literarily speaking; but it seemed a good thing to say.
[I think Stephen Potter would approve.]

***
"I've read them all, I think. Is it true that you dictate them to three secretaries, in relays?"
"My God!" cried Mollock. "Do they read that way?"

***
"And with Mr. Van Peters, too."
His persistent adding of an s to Van Peter's name was beginning to irritate Kimbark, who had a tidy mind.
[I must remember to say "I have a tidy mind" next time I make a correction.]

***
"We tried to stop him....but it was like talking into a dead telephone."

***
"You're a shrewd man--one could see that with half an eye. Mr. Anger could see it with his monocle, if he had one."
[I think that's a fairly gratuitous silly aside, but the slight "justification" is that Anger (who isn't typically angry, by the way, just as Miss Bland isn't particularly bland) is an Englishman among Americans--so perhaps he wears a metaphorical monocle in their eyes (so to speak!).]

***
"It never occurs to anybody to connect a zebra with a Persian kitten, because one is striped and the other whiskered. But a tiger is both striped and whiskered and is a very dangerous animal. That too is specious and glittering; but it's a grand line. I must get it into a book sometime."

***
"Looking for the needle in the haystack..., by the way, as a figure of speech connoting impossibility is now slightly discredited. The 'Believe It or Not' man has turned up a fellow who found a needle in a haystack after forty minutes of search."

***
"Of course," said Anger innocently, "there's the third horn of the dilemma."
[A trilemma! Ha, but one search later I see that apparently that's actually a thing. And even "quadrilemma" gets a few search results. (I stopped there!) And to think that all this time I've been making do with mere dilemmas!]

***
On the fourth morning they saw the Florida mainland, a blur upon the western horizon, and ran a chromatic scale of islands to the east.
[I think it would be modal music, actually, since each island is a different key.]

***
"Mr. Ghost thinks the note was a stroke of genius."
"Ghost?" echoed the reporter. He cocked his head at a thoughtful angle, and tried it with a new inflection. "Ghost?"

***
"There's an old saying, he observed, "that death, dessert, and Sarah Bernhardt always come in the last act."
[Okay...what?? I found no corroborating evidence of this "old" saying. (Btw, this novel is from 1932.) It's nice to think of SB having orgasms at the climax of each performance, but I doubt that's what the author meant to suggest. On the other hand, it's generally the case ime that the star of a traditional theatrical work would appear onstage throughout the play, not just in the final section. Anyway, it has a nice ring to it--I'll give it that.]

***
"Say, they don't Mocha and Java worth a damn!"
"You mean they fought?"
["Mocha and Java" to mean bickering may also be a Starrett invention. It's not in Partridge's slang dictionary.]

***
"Ghost is my name," said Walter Ghost. "Spelled in the usual or midnight way."

***
"We have heard so much of you, indirectly, from your friend Mollock that you have become a sort of fabulous monster."
"I am a myth," admitted Ghost. "Mollock invented me for purposes of his own."

***
In Walter Ghost's old-fashioned study, hemmed in by books and books and books, with here and there a picture, set like a punctuation mark between the rows....

***
"There's nobody like you under the sun, moon, and stars!"
[I applaud this character's thoroughness. After all, saying merely "nobody like you under the sun" leaves open the possibility that there is somebody like him at nighttime.]
***

BONUSES!

1. Silly Names dept. (which as you may recall is a specialty of Starrett's): In addition to the titular character, we have someone called Miss Birdflight.
2. There's a comical scene wherein the police detective looks out a window and sees what appears to be himself coming up the drive! (It's an imposter who wasn't aware the real detective was present in the house.)
3. One of the fiction-writing characters likes to think of the directory board in an office building as the "table of contents." And, in a separate metaphor, the narrator refers to an office building as a "tall filing cabinet."
4. A discussion that goes from theorizing that someone may have gone up a tree ahead of time to be concealed on the scene proceeds to distort that into the idea that the person may have gone up the tree way ahead of time and thereby "contrived to be growing there for years." This then blossoms into a lot of metaphysical nonsense in a predestined-fate vein...and concludes with someone remarking, "That's Einstein, I suppose. It sounds to me like Katzenjammer!"