I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it

As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.

Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on the circulation and you know what circulation depends on.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.