Plans are all right sometimes, I said. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right--if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the t...
Now I'm going to have my fun. I've got ten thousand dollars of your money to play with. I'm going to use it opening Poisonville up from Adam's apple to ankles.
Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no s...
It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.
I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you. She
Emotions are useless during business hours...
Brigid O'Shaughnessy: I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know. Sam Spade You know, that's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never...
A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle.
She's being stupid and she's sure she's being very clever, and that's a nuisance, but I don't think I hate her.
I'll give you your Christmas present now if you'll give me mine.I shook my head. At breakfast.But it's Christmas now.Breakfast.Whatever you're giving me, she said, I hope I don't like it.You'll have t...
I squinted straight ahead into the wind that tore at my hair and face, and the absence of the windshield took my thoughts back to Porky Grout.Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle t...
I said: You don't want to pick a fight with me, Mimi.She looked at me as if she were going to say I love you, and asked: Is that a threat?
I said: All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant and I don't want the child to be born with...
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the ci...
How do you feel? Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.
He went like that, Spade said, like a fist when you open your hand.
Are you – who make your living snooping – sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it? We're different, I said. I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get p...
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted police...
He was a roly-poly elderly man with a stoop and a waddle—
Who shot him? I asked.The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.