James M. Cain Quotations

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.