James M. Cain Quotations

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

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

A gun is like breath to a drowning man--it has to be drawn in haste.

Time is the only critic.

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

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 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.

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

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

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

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

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

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

A guitar has moonlight in it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake

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