Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastin...
You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime. (I'll Be Waiting)
You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures...
Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.
We were very much in love—the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.
Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying class, crushed against ste...
There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone...
There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop.
Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay b...
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: Philip Marlowe...Investigations. It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that...
I’m a lone wolf, unmarried…and not rich….I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in Sant...
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I
I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission. I get it, I said. I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.
He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to...
Common sense says go home and forget it, no money coming in. Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you s...
Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but t...
As for asking favors or handouts, no.'But you'll take them from a stranger.'He looked me straight in the eye. 'The stranger can keep going and pretend not to hear.
An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. Light