Jim Thompson Quotes

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.

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.

It’s easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards.

That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying.

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.

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.

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.

If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry.

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

You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.

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.

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

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

What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.

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