Quotes About Perception

The next hour was three hours long

The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something that they didn't have before. Maybe it did once, but not anymore. They're topped by too many smart minds.

You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures...

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.

Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican.

Kind of smart guesser, ain't you, young man? Can't wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly." "I'm sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us—" "This here young man don't seem to have no trouble keepin' his mouth in place." "He's married," I said. "He's had practice.

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one

It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.' 'That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said.

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.

Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else.

My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.

Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

But this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down. A gag, I said. An old, old gag. Who is this Hemingway person at all? A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good. That must take a hell of a long time, the big man said.

You know who they are?" Tony said softly. "I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right." (I'll be waiting)

Overhead the rain still pounded, with a remote sound, as if it was somebody else's rain.

She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting. I

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

A half smart guy, she said with a tired sniff. That's all I ever draw. Never once a guy that's smart all the way around the course. Never once.

I didn't say anything. I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you're not thinking.

I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass where cows grazed. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But yesterday was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber

It's so hard for women – even nice women – to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.