James Crumley > Quotes

“Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”
― James Crumley

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows. -- Dancing Bear”
― James Crumley

“...the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.”
― James Crumley, Dancing Bear

“Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead--that's environmentally sound.”
― James Crumley, Dancing Bear

“I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“An old drinking buddy of mine had come home from a two-week binge with a rose tattooed on his arm. Around the blossom was written Fuck ‘em all/and sleep till noon. His wife made him have it surgically removed, but she hated the scar even more. Every time he touched it, he grinned. Some years later she tried to remove the grin with a wine bottle, but she only knocked out a couple of teeth, which made the grin even more like a sneer. The part that I don’t understand, though, is that they are still married. He is still grinning and she is still hating it.”
― James Crumley

“I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l'homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded alcoholic private eye.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Maybe I will go to Paris.
Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never
Go back to Texas again”
― James Crumley

“I'm too young to be that old.”
― James Crumley, The Final Country

“Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue. She still loved Trahearne, still maintained her secret fidelity as if it were a miniature Japanese pine, as tiny and perfect as a porcelain cup, lost in the dark and tangled corner of a once-formal garden gone finally to seed.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I didn't know what was going on, didn't understand a bit of it, didn't like any of it. Maybe that's why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won't work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“It wasn’t a party that a Republican could understand--the marijuana smoke sweet on the air, the occasional cocaine sniffle, cold Mexican beer, good food, great conversation, and laughter--but a Parisian deconstructionist scholar might find it about as civilized as America gets. Or at least the one I met, who was visiting at UTEP, maintained. Somewhere along the way, he claimed, Americans had forgotten how to have a good time. In the name of good health, good taste, and political correctness from both sides of the spectrum, we were being taught how to behave. America was becoming a theme park, not as in entertainment, but as in a fascist Disneyland.”
― James Crumley, The Mexican Tree Duck

“When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“All drunks have theories, endlessly tedious arguments, both vocal and silent, with which to justify their drinking. They drink to forget or remember, to see more clearly or discover blindness, they drink out of fear of success or failure, drink to find a home and love or drink to get away. Their lives revolve around drink.”
― James Crumley, The Wrong Case

“I make it a policy never to argue with drug lawyers: they have decent arguments and the best drugs.”
― James Crumley, The Mexican Tree Duck

“There’s no fool like a fool who thinks he’s charming. On”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“This was the place, the place I would have come on my own wandering binge, come here and lodged like a marble in a crack, this place, a haven for California Okies and exiled Texans, a home for country folk lately dispossessed, their eyes so empty of hope that they reflect hot, windy plains, spare, almost Biblical sweeps of horizon broken only by the spines of an orphaned rocking chair, and beyond this, clouded with rage, the reflections of orange groves and ax handles.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Sadness softened her nasal twang, that ubiquitous accent that had drifted out of the Appalachian hills and hollows, across the southern plains, across the southwestern deserts, insinuating itself all the way to the golden hills of California. But somewhere along the way, Rosie had picked up a gentler accent too, a fragrant voice more suited to whisper throaty, romantic words like Wisteria, or humid phrases like honeysuckle vine, her voice for gentleman callers. “Just fine,” she repeated. Even little displaced Okie girls grow up longing to be gone with some far better wind than that hot, cutting, dusty bite that’s blowing their daddy’s crops to hell and gone. I went to get her a beer, wishing it could be something finer.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Never go to bed with a woman who has more troubles than you do.
—Lew Archer”
― James Crumley, The Wrong Case

“Surely in this vale of tears we call life, the ill, the halt, and the lame find it curious that some people with constitutions like bull calves sometimes consider their good health and strength a curse rather than a blessing. It can be, though. In fistfights, even beaten senseless, we don't fall down nearly soon enough; the joys of drug abuse don't seem to take their proper toll; and, sometimes, when we try to drink ourselves to death, we fail miserably. Miserably.”
― James Crumley, Dancing Bear

“Dumb bastard’s bound to quit,” Trahearne said after we had driven nearly half a mile. Maybe that’s the definition of dumb bastards: they never quit.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“Strange ladies draped in denim and satin, in silver and hammered gold. Ah, yes, the easy life, unencumbered by families or steady jobs or the knave responsibility. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ else to lose, right, and the nightlife is the right life for me, just keep on keepin’ on. Having fun is the fifth drink in a new town or washing away a hangover with a hot shower and a cold, cold beer in a motel room or the salty road-tired taste of a hitch-hiking hippie-chick’s breast in the downy funk of her sleeping bag. Right on. The good times are hard times but they’re the only times I know.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“He’s crazy. All you goddamned hick cops are crazy. In the cities, man, the cops are usually just dudes doing a job of work, and some of them like it and some don’t, some are good, some bad. But none of them think they’re gonna save the world from evil. Hick cops always think they’re John Wayne making the frontier safe for decent, God-fearing folk. That’s why we’re having this drink, man, ‘cause you’re a crazy cowboy.”
― James Crumley, The Wrong Case

“It’s the same in all the arts: as technology advances, humor declines. The limits and definitions of art disappear, then the art is forced to satirize itself too earnestly, and the visual arts become literary, and that, my friends, is the very first sign of cultural degeneracy.”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I remember true love.” “You mean the old days when you had to get engaged before you could show your girl’s ass to your buddies?”
― James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss