James M. Cain Quotes

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

You usually can tell when a writer is going down hill by the size of his liquor bill.

If you have to do it, you can do it.

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing his car, that's larceny.

If your writing doesn`t keep you up at night, it won`t keep anyone else up either".

She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman.

A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.

O.K." "Gee I'm glad." "Me too. I'm so sick of hot dogs and beer and apple pie with cheese on the side I could heave it all in the river." "You'll love it, Frank. We'll get a place up in the mountains, where it's cool, and then, after I get my act ready, we can go all over the world with it. Go as we please, do as we please, and have plenty of money to spend. Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?" "Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born.

That's all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.

Love, when you get fear in it, it's not love any more. It's hate.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.

When it’s too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn’t going to, either. I always know that when I get a good night’s sleep, the next day I’m not going to get any work done. Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages.

Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.

A guitar has moonlight in it.