Top 62 Quotes & Sayings by Dashiell Hammett

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail.

Feed the lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.

I like women. I really like women.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

I haven't any sort of plans for the future but I reckon things will work out in some manner.

The roof might fall in; anything could happen.

Strictly speaking, there are no real substitutes for sexual satisfaction.

Our lawyers had their chat with the Supreme Court Justice, and promised to repast the chat to other members of the Supreme Court to find out whether they wanted to hear us out.

It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.

I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.

I don't know much about him; never heard him say more than nope or yup.

Thanks for the information about what we call business.

Another man whose social life has ruined him.

I have not killed anyone. They will not let me.

With what dope I got I think it fills me in pretty well.

Looks like she's been slapping the kid again.

You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one.

People always say things like, Oh, well, he was suffering so much that he was better off dying. But that's not true. You're always better off living.

She seems to be having a pretty good time despite her worrying. That's Lily.

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.

You don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave afterwards.

Strictly speaking, there are no real substitutes for sexual satisfaction

Most things in San Francisco can be bought or taken.

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.

She grinned at me. 'You got types?' 'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.

I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink to much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does.

Nora said: 'I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fascinating people.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It’s not easy once you’re out of the habit.

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.

To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.

I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.

Nick: "Don't you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?" Nora: "No, thanks." Nick: "Maybe it would if I took one.

...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.

The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered

He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.

Listen, Dundy, it's been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn't like me.

The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

I once knew a man who stole a Ferris Wheel.

We didn't exactly believe your story.' Then --?' 'We believed your two hundred dollars.' 'You mean --' She seemed not to know what he meant. 'I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth,' he explained blandly, 'and enough more to make it all right.

When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. It's bad all around-bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Sam Spade

Talking is something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

Nora: "How do you feel?" Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.

You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me.

Yes,' Spade growled. 'And when you're slapped you'll take it and like it.' He released Cairo's wrist and with a thick open hand struck the side of his face three times savagely.

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail

Who shot him? I asked. The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Brigid: I haven't lived a good life - I've been bad, worse than you could know. Spade: That's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere.

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

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 policemen.