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Jim Thompson Quotes

1906–1977 United States

James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) was an American prose writer and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction.

United States
Novelists
Screenwriters
Short story writers

Random Jim Thompson quote

20 quotes

If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

It’s easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.

Nothing More Than Murder (1949)

Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.

Texas by the Tail (1965)

Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.

The Grifters (1963)

We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

Pop. 1280 (1964)

Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.

The Getaway (1958)

When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?

Pop. 1280 (1964)

I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.

A Hell of a Woman (1954)

If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.

The Grifters (1963)

She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.

Pop. 1280 (1964)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jim Thompson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.