A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't pr….

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poi….

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a c….

I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the co….

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..

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks ….

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 belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split..

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated..

If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive..

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the….

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….

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin ….

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable..

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway..

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself..