Jim Thompson

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.