Quotes from Richard Stark

Please...they'll kill me. I'll kill you...worry about me.

Killing was never a good idea unless there were no other ideas.

Parker spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle.

His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.

People get used to everything but being dead.

Well, it just figures," Younger told him, like a man explaining his religion.

Hemingway's judgment on people, that the competent guy does it on his own and the incompetents lean on each other." In

For you, that tree is dead.

You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you'll never even be indicted. But if you don't pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.

Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God." "You'll see him soon," Parker said.

What was the sense of talking about a problem if you didn't have a way to solve it?

The world was filling up with people, it seemed to him, who pulled their punches everywhere they went in life. Light beer, decaf coffee, low-sodium seltzer.

Walter Jelinek was a man, but he looked like a car, the kind of old junker car that had been in some bad accidents so that now the frame is bent, the wheels don't line up any more, the whole vehicle sags to one side and pulls to that side, and the brakes are oatmeal.

She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

He beat out a drumroll on the table edge with the first two fingers of each hand.

Nobody but Parker can irritate people so quick." Jacko

Grofield said, "And you, knowing about the plan, have decided to go down to Acapulco on Friday and warn the General to be on the eary." "On the what?

A TV preacher, you know those guys? Evangelists." "I thought they were all in jail," Parker said.

Stegman looked back at him. "I don't see no gun," he said. "I don't see no weapon." Parker held up his hands. "You see two of them," he said. "They're all I need.

It was dangerous to kill when there wasn't enough reason, because after a while killing became the solution to everything, and when you got to thinking that way you were only one step from the chair.