Dashiell Hammett Quotes

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one.

The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.

You don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave afterwards.

The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

I once knew a man who stole a Ferris Wheel.

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.

Who shot him? I asked. The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.

I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.

I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

Nora: "How do you feel?" Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.

It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

Most things in San Francisco can be bought or taken.

Talking is something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

The roof might fall in; anything could happen.