172 Quotes by Elmore Leonard

She said, “Coming across the yard you had your hat off, but as you reached the door you put it on.” “I guess I did, didn’t I?” “You were being... I want to say official, and your hat’s like a badge of office. You like to set it forward a little, close over your eyes.” “I’ve had that hat eight years,” Raylan said. “I never thought I wore it any special way, I just put it on my head.

Raylan got ready.

Quiet and calculating. He hasn’t changed that much since. Always mild-mannered, the nice guy – until someone steps over the line and challenges him.

I have fun writing. I don’t make it a chore. I don’t have to struggle with it.

That was the essence of the good feeling: to be able to remain calm and relax while he was keyed up and confident. Never panic. Never run. Face whatever had to be faced. Be practical, reasonable, up to a point. And if reason doesn’t work, get up and kick it in the teeth. Whatever the problem is.

The personality and the ego scream, while the soul whispers.

It’s like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there’s this kind of recognition like you both know something. Next moment the person’s gone, and it’s too late to do anything about it.

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they’re so good. He doesn’t waste any words.

The Sierra Madre was like the sea, he thought. Both of them deathless, monotonously eternal, and so indifferent in their magnitude that either could accept the dust of all the world’s dead and not have the decency to show it in posture.