Jim Thompson Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.

You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything…You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.

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

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.