Quotes from Erle Stanley Gardner

He had to have someone else give him advice. That's the trouble with him. He's never learned to stand on his own two feet and take things as they come.

I'm perfectly capable of living my own life. If I get into something, I want to get out of it through my own efforts. If I can't, I want to stay there. I don't want to have Hal Anders rushing into the city to lift me up out of the gutter, brush the mud off my clothes, smile sweetly down at me, and say, 'Won't you come home now, Mae, marry me, settle down, and live happily ever after?

The deuce, it is!" Mason ejaculated.

There were young men trying to look important; important men trying to look young.

I'm satisfied now," Mason said.

The secretary was a good-looking girl—or would have been if she'd given herself a chance. Some discouraging experience in her background had made her feel that she couldn't be bothered with sex appeal, and so she slicked her hair back, used no make-up, and hated men.

Sometimes you're on top and things are easy. Sometimes you're on the bottom. There's no need to let it worry you.

Be like the clam," Mason said. "At high tide?" "What's the difference?" he asked. "You gather clams at low tide." "Right," Mason said. "Be like a clam at high tide.

Charity may begin at home, but it ends up in the poorhouse.

If you ask me, this younger generation is altogether too careless about their morals.

I'm listening. I listen with my ears and look with my eyes. I can't do two things at once and really concentrate on them. Right now, I'm listening to your voice.

People really should cultivate the art of talking to themselves. They'd learn a lot about voices if they did.

You see, amnesia is usually the result of mental unbalance. It's an attempt on the part of the mind to escape from something that the mind either can't cope with or doesn't want to cope with. It's a refuge. It's the means a man uses to close the door of his mind on something that may lead to insanity.

You on duty at ten this morning?" he asked the attendant. The man hesitated before answering. Mason said, "You're eligible for a five dollar reward, if you were.

Clinton Foley is living?" "Of course he's living. He's living next door

There are no ethics when you're dealing with the police. Or I should say when the police are dealing with you. You're supposed to be bound by ethics. The police don't have ethics. They act on the assumption that they're 'getting the truth,' whereas you are 'protecting a criminal

You know, Donald, that's your big trouble. You fall in love every time you fall for a jane. You shouldn't do that. If a girl looks good to you, go on the make. Love her where you find her, and leave her where you love her.

You can't have understanding without having empathy, and you can't have empathy without losing money.

Married men get so they make a routine even of keeping a mistress

You Can Die Laughing (1957) Some

A few hundred feet below the car, jumping from foam-flecked rocks to dark, cool pools, a mountain stream churned over boulders, laughed back the sunlight in sparkling reflections, filled the canyon with the sound of tumbling water.

of the murder and whether he could possibly have been out there at the country club at the time the murder was committed. "There's not a chance. At the time the murder must have been committed, Hedley was in a drugstore having

We have graft today. A hundred years ago we had graft. We probably have more today than we had a hundred years ago. For three generations now people have been following reformers, fighting all sort of graft.—And what has it brought them, sweetheart? Not a damn thing, except more graft than when they started

things which seem frightfully important at the time have a habit of fading into insignificance. Events are like telephone poles, streaming back past the observation platform of a speeding train. They loom large at first, then melt into the distance, becoming so tiny they finally disappear altogether…. That's the way with nearly all of the things we think are so vital.