55 quotes
To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips. (...) Just another four-flusher.
'The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.'
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)
The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. 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.
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
I hung up.
It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.
The Little Sister (1949)
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.
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.
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.
The Big Sleep (1939)
...crazy as two waltzing mice.
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.
The High Window (1942)
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. 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. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)
[A] man lying on one of the couches with his coat off and his shirt open over a Charvet scarf you could have found in the dark by listening to it purr.
The Little Sister (1949)
She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.
The Long Goodbye (1954)
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.