Quotes from Erle Stanley Gardner

It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.

fuzzy hair that bristled out on each side above the ears

The voice was suave, pleasant, well modulated and expressive. The restless eyes were so black that it was hard to detect expression in them, but his voice more than made up for it. Here was no man who talked in a conversational monotone, but one whose every word seemed alive with expression. His motions as he moved about straightening up the room were graceful, well-timed and effective.

Could I look at the car?" Mason asked. "Got anything for me to look at?

Marriage is a working relationship. It has its moments of genuine, downright boredom. That's the trouble with Daphne. She can't stand being bored. She has to be in love—madly in love, and it's difficult to be madly in love with a husband three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.

a colorless chap who's never found himself because there isn't anything to find.

I don't want to see people as other people see them, I want to see them as I see them.

Okay," Drake said, "I'll get my man on the job and have him up there. Anything else?" "That's all for now," Mason said. "Well, wait a minute! This rancher, Overbrook, looks like a big, good-natured, rugged individual, but I'd like to find out something about him.

The checkerboarded fields of the Imperial Valley were refreshingly green with irrigated crops. Then the highline canal stretched like a huge snake below the plane and immediately the desert took over. It was as abrupt as that. Below the highline canal irrigation had turned the desert into a rich, fertile area. On the other side of the canal there was nothing but sand and a long straight ribbon of paved highway.

You took him up to the Snug-Rest Auto Court, didn't you?

The only reason Hastings wasn't happy was because he wasn't happy.

You hear a lot about people who are afraid to die. Well, they're nothing compared to the ones who are afraid to live—people who go through life just making motions—and conventional motions at that.

He's a guy with a one-track mind. When he starts for one objective he can't think of anything else.

In man there is implanted a sporting instinct to side with the underdog, but this is in man, the individual. Mob psychology is different from individual psychology, and the psychology of the pack is to tear down the weaker and devour the wounded. Man may sympathize with the underdog, but he wants to side with the winner.

Within reasonable limits, we gals all look alike nowadays, except for details.

that back of this wall was a vast yearning, a loneliness of soul which craved companionships the personality repelled.

How does everybody in Hollywood work? Drake asked. By fits and starts.

The house fairly oozed prosperity, a house which had been designed not only to be lived in but to be looked at. It had been built and decorated by a showman and for showmen.

The courtroom atmosphere was stale with that psychic stench which comes from packed humans whose emotions are roused to a high pitch of excitement.

A man does his best work when those around him are asleep.

There's a lot of telepathy, not individual telepathy so much as group telepathy, mind beating on mind, chaining you into a convention of business humdrum.

The only thing we're supposed to do is get Mrs. Allred off.

His spare frame seemed somewhat bowed under the weight of the ponderous dignity which it carried about.