Quotes from James Crumley

Home is where you hang your hangover.

Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows.

I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead--that's environmentally sound.

There's no accounting for laws. Or the changes wrought by men and time.

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.

the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.

Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows. -- Dancing Bear

I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.

Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.

I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead--that's environmentally sound.

I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.

Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never Go back to Texas again

I'm too young to be that old.

I didn't know what was going on, didn't understand a bit of it, didn't like any of it. Maybe that's why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won't work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.

Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.

When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.

I make it a policy never to argue with drug lawyers: they have decent arguments and the best drugs.

All drunks have theories, endlessly tedious arguments, both vocal and silent, with which to justify their drinking. They drink to forget or remember, to see more clearly or discover blindness, they drink out of fear of success or failure, drink to find a home and love or drink to get away. Their lives revolve around drink.

Never go to bed with a woman who has more troubles than you do. —Lew Archer

There's no fool like a fool who thinks he's charming. On

This was the place, the place I would have come on my own wandering binge, come here and lodged like a marble in a crack, this place, a haven for California Okies and exiled Texans, a home for country folk lately dispossessed, their eyes so empty of hope that they reflect hot, windy plains, spare, almost Biblical sweeps of horizon broken only by the spines of an orphaned rocking chair, and beyond this, clouded with rage, the reflections of orange groves and ax handles.

He's crazy. All you goddamned hick cops are crazy. In the cities, man, the cops are usually just dudes doing a job of work, and some of them like it and some don't, some are good, some bad. But none of them think they're gonna save the world from evil. Hick cops always think they're John Wayne making the frontier safe for decent, God-fearing folk. That's why we're having this drink, man, 'cause you're a crazy cowboy.