Quotes About Author

The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law. ( Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel , 1949)

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.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning.

A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood (Guns at Cyrano's)

The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

It's a sordid life, but I'm used to it.

So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.

I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. (The Simple Art of Murder)

I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there's one thing you can be sure of—you're a late comer to the show.

Anybody home, son?" "You ought to know." "How would I know?" "Go — yourself." "That's how people get false teeth." He showed me his in a tight grin.

he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

my whole career is based on the idea that the formula doesn't matter, the thing that counts is what you do with the formula; that is to say, it is a matter of style.

Hemingway dice en alguna parte que el buen escritor compite únicamente con los muertos.

sight and snapped a switch on his call box. 'Have

He says you make good coffee and you get up kind of late in the mornings and are apt to run to a very bright line of chatter and that we should believe anything you say, provided we can check it by five independent witnesses.

There was my yellow cowhide, well scraped on both sides from being pushed around in the boots of cars.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law ever was ever intended to be.

I put the doped whiskey down where he could reach it, if his hands hadn't been strapped.

It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.

on that night you told me you were the author of my current existence.

That was not the professional hatred of one warrior for another in the heat of battle, in which even beneath the hatred there still existed a certain begrudging respect.