When You're Quoted,
You'll Take It and Like It!

Out of the mouths of dicks...

• "The public is an untrustworthy animal. "
  -- Travis McGee in The Quick Red Fox (1964)
  ..
• "If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive"
  -- Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's Playback, in response to the question, "How can a hard man be so gentle?"
  .
• "Playing detective is like being a gravedigger. There's always dirt to be dug up, people willing to pay to have it dug up. But what kind of a man wants to spend his life scrounging for human rot six feet underground?"
  -- Mike Brennen in Fred Zackel's Cocaine and Blue Eyes
  ..
• "I like being a private eye, and even though once in a while, I've had my gums massaged with an automobile jack, the sweet smell of greenbacks makes it all worthwhile. Not to mention the dames."
  -- Kaiser Lupowitz in Woody Allen's "Mr. Big"
  ..
• "Does your mother know what you do for a living?"
  .-- Jim Rockford to thug
  ..
• " ... the hard thing to do is the right thing to do. "
  -- Travis McGee in The Lonely Silver Rain (1985)
  ..
• "A tough case ends with a corpse, a good case ends with a piss."
  -- Nick Danger, on a job well done, in The Case of the Missing Yolks.

Women!

• "Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own."
  -- Lew Archer in Black Money by Ross Macdonald
  Also used as an epigram in James Crumley's The Wrong Case, althought it seems the quote is actually by Nelson "Walk on the Wild Side" Algren. At least Macdonald acknowledges its source, when Archer prefaces it with "A wise man in Chicago once said..."
  ..
• "Maybe she was trying too hard. Most women who wear black during the day are trying too hard."
  -- Mike Brennen in Fred Zackel's Cocaine and Blue Eyes
  .
• "If we ain't supposed to eat pussy, why does it look like a taco?"
  -- Zachariah Smith, in Cat's Paw, Inc. (1991)
  

On sex

• "I'm goig to **** you."
  I said "What?"
  "I'm gonna **** you."
  There. She'd said it. She was going to asterisk me.
  -- Shell Scott recounting the advances of a female admirer in Richard Prather's Bodies in Bedlam.
  .
• "True love may be blind, but good sex sends you cross-eyed."
  -- Fitzroy Maclean Angel pontificates on the meaning of life in Mike Ripley's That Angel Look..

Men Are Such Pigs

• "The outline of the legs was eye-catching, and the hips and waist were wonderful, but I lost interest when I came to breasts like potato pancakes."
  -- Shell Scott relating the charms (or lack thereof) of a woman in Richard Prather's Bodies in Bedlam.

Can we talk?

• "Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. And I'll tell you right out that I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk."
  -- Casper Gutman (who evidently likes to talk), to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

Crime and Punishment

• "The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality. "
  -- Travis McGee in The Long Lavender Look (1970)
  ..
• "The only possible solution to this deadly trade is to ignore it. Legalize (cocaine) along with marijuana. Then the infrastructure will sag and collapse. It will no longer be fashionable. Street dealers will no longer hustle new customers on high school sidewalks. And men won't die in the squalid massacres... But maybe it is too late for legalization. The bureaucracy of detection and control has a huge national payroll... Legalization will be fought bitterly by politicians who will say that to do so will imperil our children. Are they not now imperiled?"
  -- Travis McGee in The Lonely Silver Rain (1985)

Wasn't that a party?

• "Okay, Marlowe" I said to myself "you're a tough guy. You've been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you're crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now lets see you try something really tough like putting your trousers on."
  -- Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) in Farewell My Lovely

Location, Location, Location!

• "Nothing is wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure."
  -- Lew Archer

Of course, almost all of DASHIELL HAMMETT's The Maltese Falcon could be quoted here. It's probably this genre's HAMLET, as far as quotability goes. And Chandler may have dropped a good line now and then, too.

List compiled by Kevin Burton Smith, with contributions from Peter Walker.