To say goodbye is to die a little.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
The streets were dark with something more then night.
You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.
As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style.
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.
I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.
I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.
I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.
The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.
Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.
She had eyes like strange sins.
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
The more you reason the less you create.
Shake your business up and pour it. I don't have all day.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
California, the department store state.
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
The challenge is to write about real things magically.
I'm killing time and it's dying hard.
The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.
Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.
As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
A good title is the title of a successful book.
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might,if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.
She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.
To hell with the rich, they make me sick.
There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.
She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.
And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.
All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.
She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.
I certainly admire people who do things.
The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.
A really good detective never gets married.
Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.
Had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.
It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.
It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.
There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop.
All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment." (A Qualified Farewell)
It's a swell theory," I said. "Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.
That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.
Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his teeth in.
 )
A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)
