Top 100 Dashiell Hammett Quotes
#1. He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand.
Dashiell Hammett
#3. A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It's not easy once you're out of the habit.
Dashiell Hammett
#4. The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.
Dashiell Hammett
#6. You don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave afterwards.
Dashiell Hammett
#7. To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
Dashiell Hammett
#9. I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.
Dashiell Hammett
#10. My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.
Dashiell Hammett
#11. The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second you.
Dashiell Hammett
#12. Nora said: 'I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fascinating people.
Dashiell Hammett
#13. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#14. I said: All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant and I don't want the child to be born with ...
Dashiell Hammett
#15. I said: "You don't want to pick a fight with me, Mimi."
She looked at me as if she were going to say I love you, and asked: "Is that a threat?
Dashiell Hammett
#16. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#17. You might as well take your punishment and get it over with
Dashiell Hammett
#18. It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.
Dashiell Hammett
#19. Dorothy wants to talk to you. Don't ask her to eat with us."
When Nora returned from the telephone she had a look in her eye. "Now what's up?" I asked.
"Nothing. Just 'how are you' and all that."
I said: "if you're lying to the old man, God'll punish you.
Dashiell Hammett
#20. Nora: "How do you feel?"
Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.
Dashiell Hammett
#21. She seems to be having a pretty good time despite her worrying. That's Lily.
Dashiell Hammett
#22. Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.
Dashiell Hammett
#23. You're good. You're very good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like 'Be generous, Mr. Spade.
Dashiell Hammett
#24. He did not smile. I don't believe in anything, but I'm too much of a gambler not to be affected by a lot of things.
Dashiell Hammett
#25. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#26. [Spade] scowled at Gutman and burst out irritably: Jesus God! is this the first thing you guys ever stole? You're a fine lot of lollipops! What are you going to do next
get down and pray?
Dashiell Hammett
#27. I don't know much about him; never heard him say more than nope or yup.
Dashiell Hammett
#28. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#29. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#31. This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives.
Dashiell Hammett
#32. I certainly wish you would have invented a more reasonable story. I felt distinctly like an idiot repeating it. Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon)
Dashiell Hammett
#34. He's cute," I said.
"Uh-huh," the grey man agreed, "and so's dynamite.
Dashiell Hammett
#35. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#36. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#37. He opened the door wider. "He's waiting." He gave me what was probably meant to be a significant wink, but a corner of his mouth moved more than his eye did and the result was a fairly startling face.
Dashiell Hammett
#38. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#39. What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that's hot and hollow?
Dashiell Hammett
#40. To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take the lid off life and let [you] look at the works.
Dashiell Hammett
#42. She grinned at me. 'You got types?'
'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.
Dashiell Hammett
#43. Nick: "Don't you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?"
Nora: "No, thanks."
Nick: "Maybe it would if I took one.
Dashiell Hammett
#44. A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle.
Dashiell Hammett
#46. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.
Dashiell Hammett
#47. I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.
Dashiell Hammett
#48. If you aren't normal, it's because you're tougher, saner, cooler than normal.
Dashiell Hammett
#49. 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. (Kasper Gutman)
Dashiell Hammett
#50. It's probably polite to pretend you don't see people coming out of pawnshops, anyhow.
Dashiell Hammett
#51. You're not supposed to give people things unless you're sure they'd like to get them from you ... [B]ut it goes deeper than that. when you give somebody something, you're saying out loud that you know they'd like to have you give -
Ned Beaumont, The Glass Key
Dashiell Hammett
#52. Listen, Dundy, it's been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn't like me.
Dashiell Hammett
#55. You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one.
Dashiell Hammett
#57. Who shot him? I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.
Dashiell Hammett
#58. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#59. She's cute, but she's cuckoo. She wouldn't be his daughter if she wasn't. You can't tell how much of what she says is what she thinks. And you can't tell how much of what she thinks ever really happened.
Dashiell Hammett
#60. Strictly speaking, there are no real substitutes for sexual satisfaction.
Dashiell Hammett
#61. Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.
page 155
Dashiell Hammett
#62. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.
Dashiell Hammett
#63. Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready.
Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?
Dashiell Hammett
#64. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.
Dashiell Hammett
#65. Three times I have been mistaken for a prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself.
Dashiell Hammett
#66. Brigid O'Shaughnessy: "I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know."
Sam Spade "You know, that's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere
Dashiell Hammett
#68. I was two pavements from my destination when somebodey S-s-s-s-s'd at me.
I probably didn't jump twenty feet.
Dashiell Hammett
#69. Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.
Dashiell Hammett
#70. Was she jealous?" "She was," he said, not yelling now, "and domineering, and spoiled, and suspicious, and greedy, and mean, and unscrupulous, and deceitful, and selfish, and damned bad - altogether damned bad!
Dashiell Hammett
#71. If a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.
Dashiell Hammett
#72. Dorothy asked timidly: "Did his wife say anything?
"She sent her love to you."
Nora said: "Stop being nasty.
Dashiell Hammett
#73. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#74. So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.
Dashiell Hammett
#75. I haven't any sort of plans for the future but I reckon things will work out in some manner.
Dashiell Hammett
#76. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#77. Quinn came over to refill his glass. He looked towards the bedroom door. "Where'd you find the little blonde?"
"Used to bounce it on my knee."
"Which knew?" he asked. "Could I touch it?
Dashiell Hammett
#79. 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
Dashiell Hammett
#80. Our friend Nunheim was filled full of .32s just about an hour after he copped the sneak on us - deader'n hell. The pills look like they come from the same gun that cut down the Wolf dame. The experts are matching 'em up now. I guess he wishes he'd stayed and talked to us.
Dashiell Hammett
#81. I don't want to brag about how dumb I am, but this job is plain as astronomy to me. I understand everything about it except what you have done and why, and what you're trying to do and how.
Dashiell Hammett
#82. And when you're slapped you'll take it and like it." - Detective Sam Spade
Dashiell Hammett
#83. If the Old Man said something was so, then it probably was, because he was one of these cautious babies who'll look out the window at a cloudburst and say, "It seems to be raining," on the off-chance that somebody's pouring water off the roof.
Dashiell Hammett
#85. But besides, I haven't the time, I'm too busy trying to see that you don't lose any of the money I married you for.
Dashiell Hammett
#86. You're not going to go around poking at the fire and straightening up the room again, are you?
Dashiell Hammett
#87. What do you do with all your money?"
"Me and the French hoard gold.
Dashiell Hammett
#89. You ought to have known I'd do it!" My voice sounded harsh and savage like a stranger's in my ears. "Didn't I steal a crutch from a cripple?
Dashiell Hammett
#90. I guess I can put two and two together."
"Sometimes the answer's four," I said, "and sometimes it's twenty-two ...
Dashiell Hammett
#93. The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.
Dashiell Hammett
#94. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#95. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#96. I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.
Dashiell Hammett
#97. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#98. His wife was a tall, stringy woman, perhaps five years older than her husband - say, forty - with a mouth and chin that seemed shaped for gossiping.
Dashiell Hammett
#100. He said: "I'm going to send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means you'll be out again in twenty years. You're an angel. I'll wait for you." He cleared his throat. "If they hang you I'll always remember you.
Dashiell Hammett
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