Top 100 Hammett's Quotes
#1. 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
#4. Listen, Dundy, it's been a long time since I burst into tears because a policeman didn't like me.
Dashiell Hammett
#5. It's probably polite to pretend you don't see people coming out of pawnshops, anyhow.
Dashiell Hammett
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. If you aren't normal, it's because you're tougher, saner, cooler than normal.
Dashiell Hammett
#9. What do people think about my staying with Harrison with him chasing everything that's hot and hollow?
Dashiell Hammett
#10. Metallica is a very complicated, fragile thing. On the outside, it's all metal, but on the inside it's very delicate.
Kirk Hammett
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. He's cute," I said.
"Uh-huh," the grey man agreed, "and so's dynamite.
Dashiell Hammett
#14. Just because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn't mean you have to use them all in a solo.
Kirk Hammett
#15. One of my favorite horror films of the Nineties was 'Event Horizon.'
Kirk Hammett
#16. Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.
Raymond Chandler
#18. 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
#19. This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives.
Dashiell Hammett
#20. Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.
Kirk Hammett
#22. 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
#23. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#24. 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
#25. I don't know much about him; never heard him say more than nope or yup.
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. 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
#28. The only problem I've had with my Vox wah is its tendency to move around on the floor. So now it sits on a rubber mat that says in big letters, 'Kirk's Wah-Wah Rug.'
Kirk Hammett
#29. 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
#30. I feel really fortunate that, in playing guitar and surfing, I've found two things that mean so much to me, and which really complement each other. There's definitely a spiritual thing to both of them; they totally connect you to a higher realm.
Kirk Hammett
#31. When you're first starting out, there's always the temptation to hide behind distortion because it lets you get away with murder. But, when it comes to rhythm work, you've gotta back off that gain control a bit, especially if you're playing with another guitarist.
Kirk Hammett
#33. I guess I can put two and two together."
"Sometimes the answer's four," I said, "and sometimes it's twenty-two ...
Dashiell Hammett
#34. 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
#35. Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: Well, Wilmer, I'm sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but - well, by Gad! - if you lose a son it's possible to get another - and there's only one Maltese falcon.
Dashiell Hammett
#36. She laughed. "All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?"
Not unless you're in a hurry. Let's stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.
Dashiell Hammett
#37. Getting sequestered and not really knowing what to do with your time and then discovering, 'Oh, I can watch a bunch of horror movies' has probably played out in a lot of people's discovery of horror.
Kirk Hammett
#38. 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
#39. There's something about a wah pedal that really gets my gut going! People will probably say, 'He's just hiding behind the wah.' But that isn't the case. It's just that those frequencies really bring out a lot of aggression in my approach.
Kirk Hammett
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. A lot of the main characters in horror movies are outsiders as well, so that outsider syndrome reverberates within horror fans and geeky collectors. It's kind of a rallying call that brings fans and collectors together who are a little socially retarded, maybe.
Kirk Hammett
#43. I've always been attracted to the darker things in life. I was never one to go for light, airy stuff, even as a child. My whole aesthetic has always been one of the darker side. That rings true also in my tastes in music. It's just always something I've gravitated to naturally.
Kirk Hammett
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I think it's morally wrong to keep someone away from what keeps him happy.
Kirk Hammett
#48. I think the whole concept behind lyrics is you better mean what you say, or you should like, become a storyteller. I mean, there's a lot of bands who are just storytellers, and then there are bands who actually have something valid to say. And the bands who have valid points are few and far between.
Kirk Hammett
#49. For me, one of the most perfect times to watch a horror movie is when it's cold and raining outside and there's pretty much no outdoor activity to be done. It kind of sets the mood.
Kirk Hammett
#50. 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
#51. I'm not into that whole Satanic thing. It's just something to fall back on if you don't have much imagination. Singing you fiftieth song about having lunch with Satan
I'm not into it. It's silly.
Kirk Hammett
#52. I deserve all the love you can spare me. And I want a lot more than I deserve.
Dashiell Hammett
#53. 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
#54. I love this pedal to death. The only way you could keep me from playing one is by chopping off my legs!
Kirk Hammett
#55. 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
#56. Nora said: 'I love you, Nicky, because you smell nice and know such fascinating people.
Dashiell Hammett
#57. The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second you.
Dashiell Hammett
#58. I love 'True Blood.' I love 'The Walking Dead.' Those are fantastic series.
Kirk Hammett
#59. My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.
Dashiell Hammett
#60. 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
#61. He's the guy that the joke was wrote about: 'Is he a criminal lawyer?' 'Yes, very.
Dashiell Hammett
#63. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.
Donna Leon
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
Dashiell Hammett
#69. You don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave afterwards.
Dashiell Hammett
#70. 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
#72. The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.
Dashiell Hammett
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand.
Dashiell Hammett
#77. Nora: "How do you feel?"
Nick: "Terrible. I must've gone to bed sober.
Dashiell Hammett
#78. 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
#79. Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.
Dashiell Hammett
#80. 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
#81. She seems to be having a pretty good time despite her worrying. That's Lily.
Dashiell Hammett
#82. The main riff for 'SandMan' was just something I wrote one night.
Kirk Hammett
#83. We wanted to offer something new to our audience. I hate it when bands stop taking chances.
Kirk Hammett
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Guitar playing is both extremely easy for me and extremely difficult for me at the same time.
Kirk Hammett
#88. I was really, really wild in my early twenties and a bit self-destructive.
Kirk Hammett
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.
Dashiell Hammett
#92. 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
#93. You might as well take your punishment and get it over with
Dashiell Hammett
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. It's definitely true that Stevie Ray Vaughan is one of my all-time favorite guitarists.
Kirk Hammett
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Everyone has a side to them that's kind of unexplained and feels misunderstood.
Kirk Hammett
#100. 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
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