Jim Thompson Quotes

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.

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

What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?

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.

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

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

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.

Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.

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.

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

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.

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

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

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.