Top 15 Jim Thompson Quotes

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.

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.

A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.