I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.
I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn't like, but that's what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt.
I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.
Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. (The King in Yellow)
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency.
Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram.
Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaga...
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.
Shake your business up and pour it. I don't have all day.
Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what...
La primera sensación fue que, si alguien me reñía, yo me echaría a llorar. La segunda, que la habitación era demasiado pequeña para mi cabeza. Sentía la frente muy lejos de la nuca, y los lados enorme...
It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.
If God were omnipresent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the res...
Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners o...
He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read.