Dashiell Hammett Quotes
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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
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Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?
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To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
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The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.
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Listen, Dundy, it's been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn't like me.
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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.
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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.
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I once knew a man who stole a Ferris Wheel.
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I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.
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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.
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Feed the lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.
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I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.
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I haven't any sort of plans for the future but I reckon things will work out in some manner.
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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.
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I like women. I really like women.
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...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.
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Three times I have been mistaken for a prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself.
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I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.
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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
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Strictly speaking, there are no real substitutes for sexual satisfaction
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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.
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It's awfully easy to be in love in jail
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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.
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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.
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The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.
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Most things in San Francisco can be bought or taken.
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Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.
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I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
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It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.
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He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.
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