Dashiell Hammett Quotes

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

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

He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.

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

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

You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me.

She grinned at me. 'You got types?' 'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.

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.

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

I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink to much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does.

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

The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

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.

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

Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.

I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.

We didn't exactly believe your story.' Then --?' 'We believed your two hundred dollars.' 'You mean --' She seemed not to know what he meant. 'I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth,' he explained blandly, 'and enough more to make it all right.

I once knew a man who stole a Ferris Wheel...

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

...I guess I can put two and two together." "Sometimes the answer's four," I said, "and sometimes it's twenty-two...

Brigid O'Shaughnessy: “I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know.” Sam Spade “You know, that's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere

Nick: "Don't you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?" Nora: "No, thanks." Nick: "Maybe it would if I took one.

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

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Listen, Dundy, it's been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn't like me.

I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives.

You always have, I must say, a smooth explanation ready." "What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter?

When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around-bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Sam Spade

How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm? Why don't you stay sober today? We didn't come to New York to stay sober.

...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.

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

Yes,' Spade growled. 'And when you're slapped you'll take it and like it.' He released Cairo's wrist and with a thick open hand struck the side of his face three times savagely.

He said: "I'm going to send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means you'll be out again in twenty years. You're an angel. I'll wait for you." He cleared his throat. "If they hang you I'll always remember you.

So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.

...It's probably polite to pretend you don't see people coming out of pawnshops, anyhow.

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

He opened the door wider. "He's waiting." He gave me what was probably meant to be a significant wink, but a corner of his mouth moved more than his eye did and the result was a fairly startling face.

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.

She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.” She turned to the outer door.

I said: "All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant and I don't want the child to be born with...

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

He did not smile. "I don't believe in anything, but I'm too much of a gambler not to be affected by a lot of things.

He's cute," I said. "Uh-huh," the grey man agreed, "and so's dynamite.

Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.

...What do you do with all your money?" "Me and the French hoard gold.

But besides, I haven't the time, I'm too busy trying to see that you don't lose any of the money I married you for.

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

If the Old Man said something was so, then it probably was, because he was one of these cautious babies who'll look out the window at a cloudburst and say, "It seems to be raining," on the off-chance that somebody's pouring water off the roof.

What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

If a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.

I said: "You don't want to pick a fight with me, Mimi." She looked at me as if she were going to say I love you, and asked: "Is that a threat?

But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

She's cute, but she's cuckoo. She wouldn't be his daughter if she wasn't. You can't tell how much of what she says is what she thinks. And you can't tell how much of what she thinks ever really happened.

That's wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he’s looking out for himself. Don’t we all? I don’t trust a man that says he’s not. And the man that’s telling the truth when he says he’s not I distrust most of all, because he’s and ass and an ass that’s going contrary to the laws of nature.

I don't want to brag about how dumb I am, but this job is plain as astronomy to me. I understand everything about it except what you have done and why, and what you're trying to do and how.

Don't be so damned patronizing. Your performance so far has been a little less than dazzling." "I didn't mean no harm," I said and kissed her. "That a new dress?" "Ah! Changing the subject, you coward.

-Desapareció - dijo Spade - como desaparece un puño cuando se abre la mano.

The hell of it, Miss- Is your name Wonderly or Leblanc?' She blushed and murmured: 'It's really O'Shaughnessy - Brigid O'Shaughnessy

Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.

I'll give you your Christmas present now if you'll give me mine." I shook my head. "At breakfast." "But it's Christmas now." "Breakfast." "Whatever you're giving me," she said, "I hope I don't like it." "You'll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the Aquarium said he positively wouldn't take them back. He said they'd already bitten the tails off the...

I was two pavements from my destination when somebodey S-s-s-s-s'd at me. I probably didn't jump twenty feet.

You're not going to go around poking at the fire and straightening up the room again, are you?

I said: ‘All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant.

Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet.

I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you. (Sam Spade to Brigid O'Shaughnessy)

Quinn came over to refill his glass. He looked towards the bedroom door. "Where'd you find the little blonde?" "Used to bounce it on my knee." "Which knew?" he asked. "Could I touch it?

We found a table. Nora said: "She's pretty." "If you like them like that." She grinned at me. "You got types?" "Only you, darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws." "And how about the red-head you wandered off with at Quinns' last night?" "That's silly," I said. "She just wanted to show me some French etchings.

Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: “Well, Wilmer, I’m sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn’t be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but—well, by Gad!—if you lose a son it’s possible to get another—and there’s only one Maltese falcon.

It's tough, him getting it like that. Miles had his faults same as the rest of us, but I guess he must've had some good points too.

I know a man who once stole a Ferris-wheel

You might as well take your punishment and get it over with

You’re like everybody else: some people like you, some people don’t, and some have no feeling about it one way or the other.

She laughed. "All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?" Not unless you're in a hurry. Let's stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.

...Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us - deader'n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame. The experts are matching 'em up now. I guess he wishes he'd stayed and talked to us.

You like Nick a lot, don't you, Nora?" Dorothy asked. "He's an old Greek fool, but I'm used to him." "Charles isn't a Greek name." "It's Charalambides," I explained. "When the old man came over, the mugg that put him through Ellis Island said Charalambides was too long...too much trouble to write... and whittled it down to Charles. It was all right with the old man; they could have called him X so they let him in.

My side felt a lot better when Nora called me at noon the next day. "My nice policeman wants to see you," she said. "How do you feel?" "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober." I pushed Asta out of the way and got up.

Gilbert said: “I read somewhere that when habitual criminals are accused of things they didn’t do—even little things—they’re much more upset by it than other people would be. Do you think that’s so, Mr. Charles?” “It’s likely.

Nora was eating a piece of cold duck with one hand and working on a jig-saw puzzle with the other when I got home. "I thought you'd gone to live with her," she said. "You used to be a detective: find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck." "Piece of duck or puzzle?...

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin, though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat- she perched on things - and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it,...

Men came in and dragged us apart. It took us five minutes to bring Nora to. She sat up holding her cheek and looked around the room until she saw Morelli, nippers on one wrist, standing between two detectives. Morelli's face was a mess: the coppers had worked him over a little just for the fun of it. Nora glared at me. "You damned fool," she said, "you didn't have to knock me cold. I knew you'd take him, but I wanted to see it." One of the coppers laughed. "Jesus," he said admiringly, "there's a woman with hair on her chest.

You know Quinn?" Macaulay asked me. "Ten minutes ago I was putting him to bed." Macaulay grinned. "I hope you keep his acquaintance like that - social" "Meaning what?" Macaulay's grin became rueful. "He used to be my broker, and his advice led me right up to the poorhouse steps." "That's sweet," I said. "he's my broker now and I'm following his advice." Macaulay and the girl laughed. I pretended I was laughing and returned to my table.

Yes, but- oh, sweetheart! - it wasn't only like that I would have come back to you sooner or later. From the first instant I saw you I knew..." Spade said tenderly: "You angel! Well, if you get a good break you will be out of San Quentin in twenty years and you can come back to me then.

Alice opened the door when I rang. She had on green pyjamas and held a hairbrush in one hand. She looked wearily at Quinn and spoke wearily: "Bring it in." I took it in and spread it on a bed. It mumbled something I could not make out and moved one hand feebly back and forth, but its eyes stayed shut.

We begin well, sir," the fat man purred … "I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does. … Well, sir, here's to plain speaking and clear understanding. … You're a close-mouthed man?" Spade shook his head. "I like to talk." "Better and better!" the fat man exclaimed. "I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Dorothy's coming up. I think she's tight." "That's great." I picked up my bathrobe. "I was afraid I was going to have to get some sleep." She was bending over looking for her slippers. "Don't be such an old fluff. You can sleep all day." She found her slippers and stood up in them. "Is she really as afraid of her mother as she says?" "If she's got any sense. Mimi's poison." Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: "What are you holding out on me?" "Oh, dear," I said, " I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn't know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the..." "Be funny. Don't you want something to eat?

Do you think my father killed her, Nick?” “No,” I said. “Why should I?” “Well, the police have— Listen, she was his mistress, wasn’t she?” I nodded. “When I knew them.” She stared at her glass while saying, “He’s my father. I never liked him. I never liked Mamma.” She looked up at me. “I don’t like Gilbert.” Gilbert was her brother. “Don’t let that worry you. Lots of people don’t like their relatives.

She tilted her head to the right. "You didn't even tell me you had taken the case." "I had done what? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I hadn't and haven't. My getting shot ought to prove I was an innocent bystander." "Does it hurt much?" "It itches. I forgot to have the dressing changed this afternoon." "Wasn't Nora utterly terrified?" "So was I and so was the guy that shot me. There's Halsey. I haven't spoken to him yet.

When he awakened again he could stand, and did. He doused his head in cold water and drank four glasses of water. The water made him sick and after that he began to shake with a chill. He went into the bedroom and lay down on the bare blood-stained mattress, but got up almost immediately to go stumbling and staggering in haste back to the bathroom, where he got down on hands and knees and searched the floor until he had found the rusty razor-blade. He sat on the floor and put the razor-blade into his vest-pocket. Putting it in, his fingers touched his lighter. He took the lighter out and looked at it. A cunning gleam came into his one open eye as he looked at the lighter. The gleam was not sane.

Are you – who make your living snooping – sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?" "We're different," I said. "I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should." "That's not different," he said. "I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should." "Yeah, but what good does that do?" "God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?" "Relieves congestion," I said. "Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn't have traffic problems.

Elihu Willsson opened the meeting. He said things couldn’t go on the way they were going. We were all sensible men, reasonable men, grown men who had seen enough of the world to know that a man couldn’t have everything his own way, no matter who he was. Compromises were things everybody had to make sometimes. To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted. He said he was sure that what we all most wanted now was to stop this insane killing. He said he was sure that everything could be frankly discussed and settled in an hour without turning Personville into a slaughterhouse.

Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat on Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of a delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well-known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.

He turned to face her. The two vertical lines above his nose were deep clefts between red wales. "I don't give a damn about your honesty," he told her, trying to make himself speak calmly. "I don't care what kind of tricks you're up to, what your secrets are, but I've got to have something to show that you know what you're doing." "I do know. Please believe that I do, and that it's all for the best, and--" "Show me," he ordered. "I'm willing to help you. I've done what I could so far. If necessary I'll go ahead blindfolded, but I can't do it without more confidence in you than I've got now. You've got to convince me that you know what it's all about, that you're not simply fiddling around by guess and by God, hoping it'll come out all right somehow in the end.

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.