57 Quotes by James M. Cain

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

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.

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.

Suppose you did get a job as a saleswoman? What would you get for it? No matter how they figure it up, when you’re selling goods you get paid on commission, because it stands to reason if you weren’t making commission they wouldn’t pay you. But who’s buying any goods? You’d have just stood around some store, all day long, waiting for the chance to make a living, and not making it. People eat, though, even now. You’ll have something coming in.

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.

As I say, they don’t teach it at the academy, but you learn it on the job: not every man’s death is a crime.

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.

If your writing doesn’t keep you up at night, it won’t keep anyone else up either”.

Just you and me and the road. Just a couple of tramps, just a couple of gypsies, that’s it, but we’ll be together.