James Crumley Quotes

#1. I didn't know what was going on, didn't understand a bit of it, didn't like any of it. Maybe that's why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won't work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.

James Crumley

#2. I try to stay two drinks ahead of reality and three behind a drunk

James Crumley

#3. Home is where you hang your hangover.

James Crumley

#4. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

James Crumley

#5. I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.

James Crumley

#6. There's no accounting for laws. Or the changes wrought by men and time.

James Crumley

#7. Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows.
Dancing Bear

James Crumley

#8. Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.

James Crumley

#9. I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead
that's environmentally sound.

James Crumley

#10. I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

James Crumley

#11. The only person more cynical than a drunk is a reformed drunk.

James Crumley

#12. Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.

James Crumley

#13. Consideration touches more deeply and longer than passion.

James Crumley

#14. Maybe I will go to Paris.
Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never
Go back to Texas again

James Crumley

#15. The sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.

James Crumley

#16. Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.

James Crumley

#17. I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.

James Crumley