Jim Thompson Quotes

There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you.

They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.

I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.

We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty.

When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.

She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.

I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.

I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.

If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow.

He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.

Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.

Sure there’s a hell... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it.

Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.