James M. Cain Quotes

23 quotes in 316 categories

• 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…
• 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 make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called.
• When it’s too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not…
• New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages.
• 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.
• Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.
• A guitar has moonlight in it.
• I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to…
• O.K." "Gee I'm glad." "Me too. I'm so sick of hot dogs and beer and apple pie with cheese on the side I could heave…
• They threw me off the haytruck about noon.
• I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.
• Love, when you get fear in it, it's not love any more. It's hate.
• You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.
• Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing his car, that's larceny.
• If you have to do it, you can do it.
• 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…
• That's all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.
• If your writing doesn`t keep you up at night, it won`t keep anyone else up either".
• The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

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