Top 94 Hard Boiled Quotes
#1. Cookie didn't dare light a fire, so we have cold food this evening. (Morgan)
Yum. Hard-boiled wood, my favorite. (Serenity)
Kinley MacGregor
#3. In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel and shapes it into something new.
George Pelecanos
#5. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
Ernest Hemingway,
#7. Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?
Billy Wilder
#8. Cry Wolf' is a hard-boiled thriller written at break-neck pace of political corruption and organised, very violent crime.
Mike Ripley
#9. 'Hard Boiled' is my last film in Hong Kong, before I moved to the U.S. It is the one film which is most accepted by the audience in the West.
John Woo
#10. You always had an eye for the fellow with a decent helping of sausage and hard-boiled eggs.
Gregory Maguire
#11. 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
#13. [On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.
Dorothy Parker
#14. Hard-boiled eggs are wonderful when they're really done right. I bring the water to a boil, and then I put in the eggs. And then I boil them for - well, it depends on the size of the egg - maybe eight minutes.
Alice Waters
#15. I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.
Ryu Murakami
#16. There's this secret Korean taco/cupcake truck I go to. To find it, you have to bring a hard-boiled egg to this deli in Bushwick where they give you the address.
Kurt Braunohler
#17. I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called.
James M. Cain
#18. Babies are never suicidal. Hard lives, not hard boiled eggs do that.
Brian Spellman
#19. And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.
Nic Pizzolatto
#20. She wasn't hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn't move.
Nathanael West
#21. When I made 'Hard Boiled,' I had no idea that it would be released to an international audience. I just wanted to make a film to team up my two favorite actors, Tony Leung and Chow Yun-Fat.
John Woo
#22. I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Alan Furst
#23. It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most ot endanger the harmonious progress of democracy.
B.C. Forbes
#24. I try to be a hard boiled sometimes. My kids see right through it. I'm acting. It's always, 'When I say you'll be back at 11, that means 11, not 11.15. Do you hear me!?' Then, 'Yeah, Dad.'
Liam Neeson
#25. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#26. The noise of horns and radios and shouted insults was part of the soundtrack of the capital (Hard-boiled P.I. Casta, on Rome, Italy)
Tobias Jones
#27. 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
#28. I believe everything in moderation. But breakfast is important. I have two hard-boiled or scrambled eggs with whole-wheat toast and try to get some fruit in there.
Martina Mcbride
#29. Tourists - have some fun with New york's hard-boiled cabbies. When you get to your destination, say to your driver, "Pay? I was hitchhiking."
David Letterman
#30. She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it
Raymond Chandler
#31. A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#32. A good choreographer is one that's going to collaborate, teach, guide - everything. The wonderful thing on 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' was that we had Philip Kwok - he choreographed John Woo's 'Hard Boiled,' and in the '70s, he was a martial arts actor, stunt man, fighter, choreographer in Hong Kong.
Mark Dacascos
#33. I always have hard-boiled eggs with me to eat egg whites for protein. Even when I travel, I bring eggs with me so I don't eat the plane food. Yes, I'm the person you do not want to sit next to with hard-boiled eggs.
Marissa Jaret Winokur
#34. Remember, people will judge you by your actions not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold but so does a hard-boiled egg.
Maya Angelou
#35. Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
John Banville
#36. Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting.
Tanya Luhrmann
#37. A hard-boiled little lamb going to talk a lot of lions out of their dinner, Comyn told himself grimly.
Leigh Brackett
#38. Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou.
Margaret Atwood
#39. A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.
Mason Cooley
#40. My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.
Sue Grafton
#41. I am who I am. In politics when you treat people well and they know you're honest, straight and sincere, I think it's an advantage. Just because somebody comes from a hard-boiled political culture doesn't make him a good U.S. senator.
Joseph M. Kyrillos
#42. Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress.
Marcel Proust
#43. I need to eat before a workout. If I exercise in the morning, I'll have a little oatmeal, cereal, or a hard-boiled egg with toast. If I go in the afternoon, I'll eat a turkey sandwich with cheese for lunch.
Ana Ortiz
#44. It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be
these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain
battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.
C.S. Woolley
#45. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.
Haruki Murakami
#46. The fact that he gave her the creeps just proved she was normal. He had the flat, dead face of an item turned out by machines. His eyes were cold as marbles pressed into dough. His insides went with the surface. He could beat a man insane or take it himself, and it didn't mean a thing to him.
Walter Kaylin
#47. Carli's was a small club at the end of a passage between a sporting-goods store and a circulating library. There was a grilled door and a man behind it who had given up trying to look as if it mattered who came in. (Smart-Aleck Kill)
Raymond Chandler
#48. Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.
Haruki Murakami
#49. The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern.
Mickey Wyte
#50. The Chinese went to their knees trying desperately to get their rifles into action, but the Mongols were on them too fast. Abusing their horses cruelly, they drove them right in among the riflemen, and men were kicked, stamped upon and died beneath frantic hooves.
Walter Kaylin
#51. Racket beer, sonny," he said sadly. "Tasteless as a roadhouse blonde." (Spanish Blood)
Raymond Chandler
#53. PARKER spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, ...
Beat that for a PC opening line ... not
Richard Stark
#54. He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
Raymond Chandler
#55. I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.
Haruki Murakami
#56. She was in trouble, and she passed it on to me like an infection and standing here in the rain I didn't give a damn.
A.S. Fleischman
#57. You know who they are?" Tony said softly. "I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right." (I'll be waiting)
Raymond Chandler
#58. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.
Raymond Chandler
#59. They were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy)
Tobias Jones
#60. Her bosom filled the jacket like a pair of boxing gloves stuck inside it.
Walter Kaylin
#61. The sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.
James Crumley
#62. Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. (The King in Yellow)
Raymond Chandler
#63. From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed. The silk was tight and under it the muscles worked slow and easy. I saw weight there, and control, and, brother, those are things I like in a woman.
Jonathan Latimer
#64. Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.
Haruki Murakami
#65. Her voice was as dead as the summer before last. (Nevada Gas)
Raymond Chandler
#66. The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
Raymond Chandler
#67. Walter Kaylin was great! He was outrageous, he just carried it off. He'd have this one guy killing a thousand other guys. Then they beat him into the ground, you think he's dead, but he rises up again and kills another thousand guys.
Mario Puzo
#68. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
Raymond Chandler
#69. I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy.
Haruki Murakami
#70. His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in. (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#71. She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.
Richard Stark
#72. I'm asking about the kid," Root said. "What does she get out of it?"
"My fist in her ear if she asks as many questions as you do," Pennant said. "You worry too much. Well, what do you say, Sultan?
Walter Kaylin
#74. My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it.
Judy Nichols
#75. It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed.
Walter Mosley
#76. The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can't live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin' wide in the turns.
Daniel Woodrell
#77. At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea.
Dana Stabenow
#78. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed. (I'll be waiting)
Raymond Chandler
#79. She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore.
Lawrence Block
#80. Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses?
William Lindsay Gresham
#81. Listen Charles, if blondes were poison, I'd have died thirty years ago.
Jonathan Latimer
#82. Anytime I fall for a dame like you I hope that somebody will take me outside an' cut my head off quick because I would rather be tied up to a coupla wild alligators than get myself hitched on to you.
Peter Cheyney
#84. That gun of yours tickles me where I don't like to be tickled," she said.
Jonathan Latimer
#85. A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound - after the sound of a gun. (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#86. Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.
Haruki Murakami
#87. Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.
Murder in the Dog Park
Jill Yesko
#88. From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
Raymond Chandler
#89. When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.
V.T. Davy
#90. I edited that [men's adventure] stuff, I read it all. I went from that to The Saturday Evening Post. The very first day at the Post, I edited a piece by John O'Hara and Hannah Arendt. She said, 'Come on, vat are you doink?'
"I said, 'You're okay Arendt, but you're no Walter Kaylin.
Mel Shestack
#91. Melissa arrived punctually a few minutes after eight. She was on foot and her attire was an incitement to crime.
Gianrico Carofiglio
#92. Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.
Lawrence Block
#93. You don't trust money to a junkie. You don't trust money to anyone with hard needs.
Walter Kaylin
#94. The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow)
Raymond Chandler
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