Top 100 Hammett Quotes
#1. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
#2. I've always slightly preferred Spade to Marlowe, probably just because I thought Hammett was cooler than Chandler. He was leftwing, his name shortened to Dash rather than Ray, and he didn't smoke a pipe or like cats.
Mark Billingham
#3. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.
Donna Leon
#4. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.
Ross Macdonald
#5. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
#6. We'd been living in the Arkansas Ozarks, then the Missouri Ozarks, because it is so inexpensive and does have natural wonders, but we shuffled things and moved to San Francisco, the corner of Dashiell Hammett and Pine.
Daniel Woodrell
#7. As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played.
Ross Macdonald
#8. Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.
Raymond Chandler
#9. With 'Brick' there was the Dashiell Hammett influence, and with 'Brothers Bloom' there was a really strong Fellini influence - both those movies wore that on their sleeve.
Rian Johnson
#10. Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
James Ellroy
#11. 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.
Raymond Chandler
#12. [On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.
Dorothy Parker
#13. In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
Eleanor Catton
#14. He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand.
Dashiell Hammett
#16. 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
#17. For 'Death Magnetic,' I used what I always use, which is my standard touring rack, which is filled with some Boogie stuff and a Marshall that I've had forever.
Kirk Hammett
#18. The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.
Dashiell Hammett
#20. Because of things like iTunes and streaming and social networking, it's destroyed music. It's destroyed the motivation to go out there and really make the best record possible. It's a shame.
Kirk Hammett
#21. You don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave afterwards.
Dashiell Hammett
#22. To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
Dashiell Hammett
#24. I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.
Dashiell Hammett
#26. He's the guy that the joke was wrote about: 'Is he a criminal lawyer?' 'Yes, very.
Dashiell Hammett
#27. My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.
Dashiell Hammett
#28. I love 'True Blood.' I love 'The Walking Dead.' Those are fantastic series.
Kirk Hammett
#29. The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second you.
Dashiell Hammett
#30. Nora said: 'I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fascinating people.
Dashiell Hammett
#31. One thing I've noticed over the years is that young players - I mean 10- and 12-year-olds - really like my guitar style. There's something in my guitar style that they totally can latch onto and learn quickly, and then go from there to your Yngwie Malmsteens or your Steve Vais or whatever.
Kirk Hammett
#32. I love this pedal to death. The only way you could keep me from playing one is by chopping off my legs!
Kirk Hammett
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Everyone has a side to them that's kind of unexplained and feels misunderstood.
Kirk Hammett
#36. Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don't know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps that were in the studio.
Kirk Hammett
#37. 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
#38. It's definitely true that Stevie Ray Vaughan is one of my all-time favorite guitarists.
Kirk Hammett
#39. 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
#40. For a while I was collecting Satan and devil stuff - you know, anything that had to do with old Beelzebub or Lucifer. But I had to put the brakes on it, because there's a lot of stuff out there, and the collection was just growing too quickly.
Kirk Hammett
#41. You might as well take your punishment and get it over with
Dashiell Hammett
#42. For the 'Load' album, I was experimenting so much with tone that I had to keep journals on what equipment I was using. For 'Hero of the Day,' I know I used a 1958 Les Paul Standard with a Matchless Chieftain, some Boogie amps and a Vox amp - again, they're all blended.
Kirk Hammett
#43. It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.
Dashiell Hammett
#44. 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
#45. Nora: "How do you feel?"
Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.
Dashiell Hammett
#46. I was really, really wild in my early twenties and a bit self-destructive.
Kirk Hammett
#47. Guitar playing is both extremely easy for me and extremely difficult for me at the same time.
Kirk Hammett
#48. The concept of clearing one's mind before performing a task so that it is consumed by nothing but that task, yet is open at the same time to anything that might happen - that concept can be applied to playing guitar, and it's enormously helpful for improvising.
Kirk Hammett
#49. 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.
Dashiell Hammett
#50. We wanted to offer something new to our audience. I hate it when bands stop taking chances.
Kirk Hammett
#51. The main riff for 'SandMan' was just something I wrote one night.
Kirk Hammett
#52. She seems to be having a pretty good time despite her worrying. That's Lily.
Dashiell Hammett
#53. I feel like I've matured more musically than I have personally. But I totally embrace what becoming older has to offer. I find the wisdom that comes with each passing year is a trip.
Kirk Hammett
#54. Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.
Dashiell Hammett
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. [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
#59. I don't know much about him; never heard him say more than nope or yup.
Dashiell Hammett
#60. 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
#61. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#62. When I got my first Marshall amp, it was so empowering. No one ever forgets their first Marshall amp if you're a guitar player pursuing a big powerful sound. I mean, no one ever forgets their first Marshall amp.
Kirk Hammett
#64. Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.
Kirk Hammett
#65. This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives.
Dashiell Hammett
#66. 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
#68. One of my favorite horror films of the Nineties was 'Event Horizon.'
Kirk Hammett
#69. Just because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn't mean you have to use them all in a solo.
Kirk Hammett
#70. He's cute," I said.
"Uh-huh," the grey man agreed, "and so's dynamite.
Dashiell Hammett
#71. If a guitar is too easy for me to play, it makes me too laid back. I like to battle with my guitar.
Kirk Hammett
#72. 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
#73. you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again
Dashiell Hammett
#74. When people are confronted with something they've never seen before, they really don't know how to react.
Kirk Hammett
#75. I went through a whole blues period in the Nineties, and that had some influence on 'Load' and 'ReLoad.'
Kirk Hammett
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. If I had unlimited funds, wall space and storage, I would collect a lot more things, like 'Planet of the Apes,' 'Star Wars,' science fiction stuff, autographs, and prop guns and weapons. I have to draw the line somewhere.
Kirk Hammett
#79. 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
#80. Metallica is a very complicated, fragile thing. On the outside, it's all metal, but on the inside it's very delicate.
Kirk Hammett
#81. My guitars are my umbilical cord. They're directly wired into my head.
Kirk Hammett
#82. What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that's hot and hollow?
Dashiell Hammett
#83. 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
#85. She grinned at me. 'You got types?'
'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.
Dashiell Hammett
#86. 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
#87. A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle.
Dashiell Hammett
#89. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.
Dashiell Hammett
#90. I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.
Dashiell Hammett
#91. If you aren't normal, it's because you're tougher, saner, cooler than normal.
Dashiell Hammett
#92. I don't think success has changed us as people at all. We are the same lunatics that we were when this band first got going. We never see ourselves as being on a higher level than our fans.
Kirk Hammett
#93. I've learned that there's a signature Metallica sound, and if we stray too far from that, our fans get impatient, or they just don't understand, or they miss the point. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing; it's just something we have to contend with.
Kirk Hammett
#94. 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
#95. It's probably polite to pretend you don't see people coming out of pawnshops, anyhow.
Dashiell Hammett
#96. 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
#97. Listen, Dundy, it's been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn't like me.
Dashiell Hammett
#100. You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one.
Dashiell Hammett
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