Erle Stanley Gardner > Quotes

“I like what I like and not what I'm supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don't like.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case Of The Careless Cupid

“It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner

“Now listen, Lam," he said, "you’re a nice egg but you’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, Top of the Heap

“Dear Editor: It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. ”
― Erle Stanley Gardner

“Just because people are liars is no reason for us to be fools.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

“Courage is the antidote to danger.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

“You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possibly - that too many men were trying to get lost of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Perjured Parrot

“To reach your goal, remember that courage is the only antidote for danger.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

“We’re a dramatic people,” Perry Mason said slowly. “We’re not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It’s a national craving. We’re geared to a rapid rate of thought. We want to have things move in a spectacular manner.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Howling Dog

“I have one weapon," Mason said. "It's a powerful weapon. But sometimes it's hard to wield it because you don't know just where to grab hold of it."
"What weapon is that?" Della Street asked.
"The truth," Mason said.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner

“Then I’ll have more fun searching in vain then marrying one of the wrong sort.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case Of The Vagabond Virgin

“A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Negligent Nymph

“When a man starts running away from things in life he builds up a whole chain of complexes and fear.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

“it takes a powerful motivation to lead to murder. That’s why people don’t usually murder comparative strangers.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Silent Partner

“I told you just what she was—all velvet and claws!”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Velvet Claws

“Objected to as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Rolling Bones

“Life is like that. We can only see from birth to death. The rest of it is cut from our vision." Drake”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Haunted Husband

“I take it," the lawyer remarked musingly, "patience isn't one of your virtues."
"I didn't know," she said, "that patience WAS a virtue.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Lame Canary

“I’m listening. I listen with my ears and look with my eyes. I can’t do two things at once and really concentrate on them. Right now, I’m listening to your voice.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Postponed Murder

“overboard,”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Amorous Aunt

“will-have a tendency to”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Reluctant Model

“Don’t ever fool yourself that facts don’t fit, if you get the right explanation. They’re just like jigsaw puzzles—when you get them right, they’re all going to fit together.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Howling Dog

“There was that about her which indicated she was warily watchful.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Sulky Girl

“The whole structure of the law has to be a dignified, imposing edifice and built on firm foundations, if it is going to stand. Whenever you violate the law, you are tearing down a part of that structure, regardless of what goal you may want to achieve.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Haunted Husband

“A nurse,” I said, “would be wearing a starched uniform, and she’d have a fever thermometer ready to jab into a patient’s mouth at the first sign of acute convalescence.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Knife Slipped

“Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don’t see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Perjured Parrot

“The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Baited Hook

“I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don’t.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Knife Slipped

“But don’t they have more sunshine here than they do in San Francisco? Don’t you have lots of fog?” “Fog!” the man exclaimed. “Why that’s the thing that makes San Francisco. When that fog comes rolling in from the ocean, it peps you up. It’s bracing, stimulating. There’s a lot of rush and bustle in connection with San Francisco. Down here, people seem to have the hookworm. You girls really don’t live here, do you?” “What makes you think we don’t?” Della said. “Too much class—too much pep.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Crooked Candle

“He was despondent,” Eves said, “so low he could walk under a snake’s belly on stilts.”
― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Substitute Face