Best 53 quotes of Dashiell Hammett on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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

I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

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.

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.

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

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail

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

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

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

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

Most things in San Francisco can be bought or taken.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

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

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.

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

The roof might fall in; anything could happen.

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.

Three times I have been mistaken for a prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Don't be so damned patronizing. Your performance so far has been a little less than dazzling." "I didn't mean no harm," I said and kissed her. "That a new dress?" "Ah! Changing the subject, you coward.

Dorothy asked timidly: "Did his wife say anything? "She sent her love to you." Nora said: "Stop being nasty.

He was the perfect soldier: he went where you sent him, and stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him.

How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm? Why don't you stay sober today? We didn't come to New York to stay sober.

...I guess I can put two and two together." "Sometimes the answer's four," I said, "and sometimes it's twenty-two...

I just tell you what happens. I don't explain it.

My side felt a lot better when Nora called me at noon the next day. "My nice policeman wants to see you," she said. "How do you feel?" "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober." I pushed Asta out of the way and got up.

Plans are all right sometimes," I said. "And sometimes just stirring things up is all right--if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top.

She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.” She turned to the outer door.

...What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that's hot and hollow?