The little one-story house was as neat as a fresh pinafore. The front lawn was cut lovingly and very green. The smooth composition driveway was free of grease spots from standing cars, and the hedge t...
That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.
That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.
That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws...
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 j...
Sooner or later I may figure out why you like being a kept poodle.
She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tire, rim and all.
She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.
She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it
Philip Marlowe, 38, a private licence operator of shady reputation, was apprehended by police last night while crawling through the Ballona Storm Drain with a grand piano on his back. Questioned at th...
I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and it doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it.
I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination,
I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swat...
I dreamed I was far down in the depths of icy green water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long blond hair that kept floating around in front of my face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes a...
Era como alguien que uno encuentra en un barco y llega a conocer muy bien aunque, al mismo tiempo, no lo conozca en absoluto. Se había ido de la misma forma que el pasajero que se despide en el muelle...
Do you like orchids?’ ‘Not particularly,’ I said. The General half closed his eyes. ‘They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of...
As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style.
Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy. Ever kill a man, Marlowe? Yes. Nasty feeling, isn’t it? Some people like it. His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they loo...
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.