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Jim Thompson (writer)

American writer (1906–1977)

James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) was an American prose writer and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction.

Quotes

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  • Sure there’s a hell... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it.
  • I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.
  • They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.
  • Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.
  • There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you.
  • That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying.
  • He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.
  • Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.
  • Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.
  • What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?
  • I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.
  • Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.
    • Texas by the Tail (1965)
  • There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.
    • Quoted as an epigraph by Robert Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1995)

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

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  • She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good.
    • Ch. 2
  • I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.
    • Ch. 2
  • If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow.
    • Ch. 5
  • There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
    • Ch. 12
  • We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty.
    • Ch. 12
  • If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry.
    • Ch. 12
  • It’s easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards.
    • Ch. 21
  • When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.
    • Ch. 22
  • I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.
    • Ch. 22
  • A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.
    • Ch. 24
  • You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.
    • Ch. 25
  • You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything…You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.
    • Ch. 25

See also

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