James Cain Quotes

#1. James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.

Bill Callahan

#2. He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest ... a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

Raymond Chandler

#3. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night.
Postman always rings twice, James Cain.

James M. Cain

#4. 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

#5. That's all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.

James M. Cain

#6. If you have to do it, you can do it.

James M. Cain

#7. A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.

James M. Cain

#8. I write of the wish that comes true
for some reason, a terrifying thought.

James M. Cain

#9. Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.

James M. Cain

#10. I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church.

James M. Cain

#11. I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

James M. Cain

#12. He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical.

James M. Cain

#13. Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain.

Steven James

#14. A smile is nature's freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can't go back

James M. Cain

#15. I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman.

James M. Cain

#16. By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out.

James M. Cain

#17. 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

#18. A guitar has moonlight in it.

James M. Cain

#19. Tomorrow night, if I come back, there'll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.

James M. Cain

#20. Up close, she could see the sharp, cold, look that she constantly shot at Mr. Treviso, particularly when there was a break, and she was waiting to come in. It shattered illusion for Mildred. She preferred to remain at a distance, to enjoy this child as she seemed, rather than as she was.

James M. Cain

#21. 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

#22. If he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;

James M. Cain

#23. They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

James M. Cain

#24. I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake

James M. Cain

#25. You usually can tell when a writer is going down hill by the size of his liquor bill.

James M. Cain

#26. There was something unnatural, a little unhealthy, about the way she inhaled Veda's smell as she dedicated the rest of her life to this child who had been spared.

James M. Cain

#27. let's get stinko.

James M. Cain

#28. Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing his car, that's larceny.

James M. Cain

#29. If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

James M. Cain

#30. Never take the mistress if you can get the maid.

James M. Cain

#31. A gun is like breath to a drowning man
it has to be drawn in haste.

James M. Cain

#32. Time is the only critic.

James M. Cain

#33. She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.

James M. Cain

#34. New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages.

James M. Cain

#35. Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts ...

James M. Cain

#36. We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual.

James M. Cain

#37. You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it's working on; then you can write a novel.

James M. Cain

#38. A woman is a funny animal.

James M. Cain

#39. I went to the animals' fair, The birds and the beasts were there, The old baboon By the light of the moon Was combing his auburn hair; The monkey he got drunk, And fell on the elephant's trunk, The elephant sneezed And fell on his knees - And what became of the monkety-monk?

James M. Cain

#40. If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

James M. Cain

#41. The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

James M. Cain

#42. Love, when you get fear in it, it's not love any more. It's hate.

James M. Cain