James M. Cain Quotes

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

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

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake

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.

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

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.

Time is the only critic.

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

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.

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

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

A guitar has moonlight in it.

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

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

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

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

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

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

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

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