There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don’t mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren’t any of those.
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
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.
The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve a problem.
The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
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.
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.
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.
I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.