Jim Thompson > Quotes

“Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.”
― Jim Thompson

“There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“A weed is a plant out of place.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“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.”
― Jim Thompson

“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. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain't a heck of a way to be in bed with a pretty woman. The two of you arguing about murder, and threatening each other, when you're supposed to be in love and you could be doing something pretty nice. And then I thought, well, maybe it ain't so strange after all. Maybe it's like this with most people, everyone doing pretty much the same thing except in a different way. And all the time they're holding heaven in their hands.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

“I ain't saying you're a liar, because that wouldn't be polite. But I'll tell you this, ma'am. If I loved liars, I'd hug you to death.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

“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.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“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.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“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.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

“If we all had what we wanted to eat... We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too.”
― Jim Thompson, The Getaway

“What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot.”
― Jim Thompson, Nothing More Than Murder

“I just learned two things there at that college, Mr. Ford, that was ever of any use to me. One was that I couldn’t do any worse than the people that were in the saddle, so maybe I’d better try pulling ’em down and riding myself. The other was a definition I got out of the agronomy book, and I reckon it was even more important than the first. It did more to revise my thinking, if I’d really done any thinking up until that time. Before that I’d seen everything in black and white, good and bad. But after I was set straight I saw that the name you put to a thing depended on where you stood and where it stood. And…and here’s the definition, right out of the agronomy books: ‘A weed is a plant out of place.’ Let me repeat that. ‘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.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“It was like being asleep when you were awake and awake when you were asleep. I'd pinch myself, figuratively speaking - I had to keep pinching myself. Then I'd wake up kind of in reverse; I'd go back to the nightmare I had to live in. And everything would be clear and reasonable.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. […] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“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.

You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

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.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“I'd forgotten about it, and now I forgot it again. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“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.”
― Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman

“There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.”
― Jim Thompson

“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. You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“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.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

“The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.”
― Jim Thompson, The Nothing Man

“Yeah, Johnnie,’ I said, ‘it’s a screwed up, bitched up world, and I’m afraid it’s going to stay that way. And I’ll tell you why. Because no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it. They can’t see that things are screwed up, so they’re not worried about it. What they’re worried about is guys like you.

‘They’re worried about guys liking a drink and taking it. Guys getting a piece of tail without paying a preacher for it. Guys who know what makes ’em feel good, and aren’t going to be talked out of the motion … They don’t like you guys, and they crack down on you. And the way it looks to me they’re going to be cracking down harder and harder as time goes on. You ask me why I stick around, knowing the score, and it’s hard to explain. I guess I king of got a foot on both fences, Johnnie. I planted ’em there early and now they’ve taken root, and I can’t move either way and I can’t jump. All I can do is wait until I split. Right down the middle.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Usually, during the past fifteen-odd years, I'd hated to see the morning come. That's a psychotic symptom, you know, not wanting to awaken--hating to face things that are bound to be more than you can handle.”
― Jim Thompson, After Dark, My Sweet

“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.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Strolling down a white-graveled walk to the cliff above the ocean, he let his eyes rove aimlessly over the expanse of sea and sand: The icy-looking whitecaps, the blinking, faraway sails of boats, the sweeping, constantly searching gulls. Desolation. Eternal, infinite. Like Dostoevski’s conception of eternity, a fly circling about a privy, the few signs of life only emphasized the loneliness.”
― Jim Thompson, The Grifters

“I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.”
― Jim Thompson, The Grifters

“I knew–though I didn't recognize the fact–that I wasn't all right.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me