James M Cain Quotes

A year and a half had indeed made some changes in Veda's appearance. She was still no more than medium height, but her haughty carriage made her seem taller. The hips were as slim as ever, but had taken on some touch of voluptuousness. The legs were Mildred's, to the last graceful contour. But the most noticeable change was what Monty brutally called the Dairy: two round, swelling protuberances that had appeared almost overnight on the high, arching chest. They would have been large, even for a woman: but for a child of thirteen they were positively startling. Mildred had a mystical feeling about them: they made her think tremulously of Love, Motherhood, and similar milky concepts. ~ James M. Cain

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

I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble. ~ James M. Cain

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. ~ James M. Cain

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

Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio, but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn't be any doubt about that. ~ James M. Cain

There's a shark. Following the ship.'
I tried not to look, but couldn't help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green. We walked back to the deck chairs.
Walter, we'll have to wait. Till the moon comes up.'
I guess we better have a moon.'
I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight. ~ James M. Cain

Then she got up, went to Monty's mirror, and began combing her hair, while little cadenzas absentmindedly cascaded out of her throat, and cold drops cascaded over Mildred's heart. For Veda was stark naked. From the massive, singer's torso, with the Dairy quaking in front, to the slim hips, to the lovely legs, there wasn't so much as a garter to hide a path of skin. ~ James M. Cain

Veda began it, but when she finished it, or whether she finished it, Mildred never quite knew. Little quivers went through her and they kept going through her the rest of the night, during the supper party, when Veda sat with the white scarf wound around her throat, during the brief half hour, while she undressed Veda, and put the costume away; in the dark, while she lay there alone, trying to sleep, not wanting to sleep.
This was the climax of Mildred's life. ~ James M. Cain

The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. ~ James M. Cain

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. ~ James M. Cain

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. ~ James M. Cain

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

A receptionist is a lazy dame that can't do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it. She's the one in the black silk dress, cut low in the neck and high in the legs, just inside the gate, in front of that little one-position switchboard, that she gets a right number out of now and then, mostly then. You know, the one that tells you to have a seat, Mr Doakes will see you in just a few minutes. Then she goes on showing her legs and polishing her nails. If she sleeps with Doakes she gets twenty bucks a week, if not she gets twelve. In other words, nothing personal about it and I don't want to hurt your feelings, but by the looks of this card I'd say that was you.'
'It's quite all right. I sleep fine. ~ James M. Cain

A gun is like breath to a drowning man
it has to be drawn in haste. ~ James M. Cain

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. ~ James M. Cain

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

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith. ~ Eleanor Catton

I'm thinking about Bert.'
Without hearing any more about it, she knew what this meant: Wally had had his fun, and now he was getting ready to get out from under. She waited a moment or two, as she often did when angered, but in spite of her effort to sound casual, her voice had a vibrant sound to it. 'And what about Bert? ~ James M. Cain

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake ~ James M. Cain

let's get stinko. ~ James M. Cain

Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing his car, that's larceny. ~ James M. Cain

A woman is a funny animal. ~ James M. Cain

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. ~ James M. Cain

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M.Cain. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children's books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer's word counter feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet. ~ David Nicholls

By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out. ~ James M. Cain

Never take the mistress if you can get the maid. ~ James M. Cain

A smile is nature's freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can't go back ~ James M. Cain

Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts ... ~ James M. Cain

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip. ~ James M. Cain

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

Not so fast, baby – let us pause and examine that idea. Why would he want to take you out? Why do they ever want to take us out? As a compliment
to us, say they. To show us a good time, to prove the high regard they have for us. They're a pack of goddam liars. In addition to being dirty bastards, and very dumb clucks, they are also goddam liars. There's practically nothing can be said in favour of them, except they're the only ones we've got. ~ James M. Cain

When all is said and done, later in this century, and in the next one, and the century after that, it will be understood that. . .the greatest American writer of our time was James M. Cain. ~ Arlene Sanders

If you have to do it, you can do it. ~ James M. Cain

They threw me off the haytruck about noon. ~ James M. Cain

He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical. ~ James M. Cain

If he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal; ~ James M. Cain

I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren't drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night. ~ James M. Cain

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. ~ James M. Cain

Tomorrow night, if I come back, there'll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death. ~ James M. Cain

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs. ~ James M. Cain

There was something unnatural, a little unhealthy, about the way she inhaled Veda's smell as she dedicated the rest of her life to this child who had been spared. ~ James M. Cain

Mildred sat quite still, and when she heard Veda drive off she was consumed by a fury so cold that it almost seemed as though she felt nothing at all. It didn't occur to her that she was acting less like a mother than like a lover who had unexpectedly discovered an act of faithlessness, and avenged it. ~ James M. Cain

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

You can drive at 16, go to war at 18, drink at 21, and retire at 65. So who can say what age you have to be to find your true love? ~ M.R. James

In love-making, as in other arts, those who do it best cannot tell how it is done. ~ James M. Barrie

For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded. ~ James M. Barrie

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man. ~ James M. Barrie

I am aware that those hateful persons called Original Researchers now maintain that Raleigh was not the man; but to them I turn a deaf ear. ~ James M. Barrie

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, 'Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen,' buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library. ~ James M. Buchanan

Know what the best thing about morning sex is?" Caesar snorted and pinched Nate's hip.
"Sex?"
"No," Nate laughed, "nobody has to sleep on the wet spot. ~ James Buchanan

E L James, Party Games

you're looking kind of smug
inserting that god damn anal plug
giving me your kinky love

after writing Fifty Shades
you're acting like some kind of renegade
giving me your kinky love

sit me on a dildo and spin me right around
chain me up and hang me upside down
giving me your kinky love

god damn you E L James
making me into some kind of party game
giving me your kinky love

put me in a dream
and wheel in the Fucking Machine
god damn you E L James

spank a hand on my bum
see how much I can cum
god damn you E L James

stand me up and sit me down
lay me out and roll me about
god damn you E L James

BDSM
electro impulses up my brainstem
god damn you E L James

cast me in a submissive role-play
with my genitals on display
god damn you E L James

suspend me high in the air
slap me around like I don't care
god damn you E L James

take that whip off the shelf
make me forget myself
god damn you E L James

Why are you wearing oven mittens?
branding iron your name written
inner goddess don't keep in hidden
god damn you E L James

holy crap
my mind has snapped
to forget one thing that I have heard
I'm never going to use the safe-word
god damn you E L ~ R.M. Romarney

Next year he did not come for her. She waited in a new frock because the old one simply would not meet, but he never came. "Perhaps he is ill," Michael said. "You know he is never ill." Michael came close to her and whispered, with a shiver, "Perhaps there is no such person, Wendy!" and then Wendy would have cried if Michael had not been crying. ~ James M. Barrie

What a polite game tennis is. The chief word in it seems to be "sorry" and admiration of each other's play crosses the net as frequently as the ball. ~ James M. Barrie

The elementary and basic approach that I suggest places "the theory of markets" and not the "theory of resource allocation" at center stage. My plea is really for the adoption of a sophisticated "catallactics,"… ~ James M. Buchanan

There is a difference between seeking to know things for the sake of knowledge itself and being willing to undergo renunciation to be possessed by the truth. ~ James M. Houston

I like well to be in the company of explorers ~ James M. Barrie

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. ~ William James

They hold their great balls in the open air, in what is called a fairy-ring. For weeks afterward you can see the ring on the grass. It is not there when they begin, but they make it by waltzing round and round. Sometimes you will find mushrooms inside the ring, and these are fairy chairs that the servants have forgotten to clear away. The chairs and the rings are the only tell-tale marks these little people leave behind them, and they would remove even these were they not so fond of dancing that they toe it till the very moment of the opening of the gates. ~ James M. Barrie

As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.] ~ Judith Lewis Herman

I bowl so slowly that if I don't like a ball I can run after it and bring it back ~ James M. Barrie

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. ~ James Joyce

You find a glimmer of happiness in this world, there's always someone who wants to destroy it. ~ James M. Barrie

A loving wife is better than making 50 in cricket, or even 99, beyond that I will not go. ~ James M. Barrie

Cultural categories, in fact, need not constrain us since they can always be used against themselves to open up new possibilities. ~ James M. Redfield

He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. Give him one more chance. ~ Ian Fleming

[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do. ~ James Robertson

You were hidden behind walls of ice; no man had passed them; I broke them down and love leapt to love, and you lie here, my beautiful, love in the arms of its lover. ~ James M. Barrie

If anybody ever flied to the Moon, the very next day Trippe will ask the Civil Aeronautics Board to authorize regular service. ~ James M. Landis

James M. McPherson spoke for a later generation of scholars when he asserted in 1988 that Lincoln's entire, public inaugural journey might have been a "mistake," because in his effort to avoid "a careless remark or slip of the tongue" that might "inflame the crisis further," the president-elect "indulged in platitudes and trivia," producing "an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer. ~ Harold Holzer

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall. ~ James M. Barrie

Do I believe in ghosts? ... I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me. ~ M.R. James

The man of science appears to be the only man who has something to say just now, and the only man who does not know how to say it. ~ James M. Barrie

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America's "Wild West" of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father.

New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world's epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa.

Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever.

After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach.

While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced ~ James M. LaRossa Jr.

Yes, I definitely prefer the daylight population of the playing fields to that which comes there after dark. ~ M.R. James

The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles. ~ Leon M. Lederman

Because I am for them, Commander, because their ancestors stood up to that Nazi, Bligh, just like I would be for one little Jew, terrified and hungry, crossing the Pyrenees to get away to freedom from the Gestapo. One little Jew. You wouldn't have him in your house. He stinks, he has lice. But, you know what, Commander? I am for him, every time. And he would punch me in the shoulder and lug his M-1 up onto the ridge, night after night. ~ James A. Michener

It was almost as if a 3 a.m. religion existed, one that was self-reliant and relished how the world can be lived upside-down but still lived to its fullest potential. ~ James Altucher

All of this material on key length block size and the number of rounds of encryption may seem dreadfully boring; however, it's important material, so be sure to brush up on it while preparing for the exam. ~ James M. Stewart

A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night. ~ James M. Barrie

How shall we ever know if it's morning if there's no servant to pull up the blinds? ~ James M. Barrie

One way aluminum (Al) can penetrate the blood brain barrier is by hiding in Trojan horse-like fashion inside a macrophage (Mφ). ~ James Morcan

The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands, and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long and that the light shone through them. ~ M.R. James

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them. ~ William James

Those who are prepared to die are most prepared to live. ~ James M. Barrie

Hermann Buhl with K2. First ~ James M. Tabor