Erle Stanley Gardner Quotes

will-have a tendency to

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.

as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.

I like what I like and not what I'm supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don't like.

To reach your goal, remember that courage is the only antidote for danger.

Reason I am telling you all of this is that, according to Harrod, Fern Driscoll

I have never stuck up for any criminal. I have merely asked for the orderly administration of an impartial justice ... Due legal process is my own safeguard against being convicted unjustly. To my mind, that's government. That's law and order.

You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possibly - that too many men were trying to get lost of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible.

Clinton Foley is living?" "Of course he's living. He's living next door

Life is like that. We can only see from birth to death. The rest of it is cut from our vision." Drake

You can't have understanding without having empathy, and you can't have empathy without losing money.

I take it," the lawyer remarked musingly, "patience isn't one of your virtues."
"I didn't know," she said, "that patience WAS a virtue.

appraisal was evident in his glance. "Well, then," he said, "let's hear about

The whole structure of the law has to be a dignified, imposing edifice and built on firm foundations, if it is going to stand. Whenever you violate the law, you are tearing down a part of that structure, regardless of what goal you may want to achieve.

It takes a powerful motivation to lead to murder. That's why people don't usually murder comparative strangers.

After you've written a story, the thing to do is sell it. Sounds simple, and it is, if one will follow certain basic principles of salesmanship.

I have one weapon," Mason said. "It's a powerful weapon. But sometimes it's hard to wield it because you don't know just where to grab hold of it."
"What weapon is that?" Della Street asked.
"The truth," Mason said.

We're a dramatic people," Perry Mason said slowly. "We're not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It's a national craving. We're geared to a rapid rate of thought. We want to have things move in a spectacular manner.

Just because people are liars is no reason for us to be fools.