The Killer Inside Me Quotes
"We are, in fact, in the midst of a small Thompson revival: almost all his novels are in print in paperback."
"Before Kerouac, before Ginsberg, before Marlon Brando in The Wild One... this anonymous and little-read Oklahoma novelist captured the spirit of his age."
"The subject suffers from strong feelings of guilt... combined with a sense of frustration and persecution... which increase as he grows older."
"In Lou Ford, Jim Thompson drew for the first time a picture of the Great American Sociopath."
"In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point... But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job."
"The honest—if a little dopey—eyes, the sincere smile. We just know the first thing out of this fellow’s mouth is going to be 'Howya doon?'"
"There’s nothing elegant in The Killer Inside Me. In fact, one of my chief amazements on rereading it was how much Thompson got away with."
"Every one of Lou Ford’s casual country vulgarities is balanced—and out-balanced—by some pithy and unsettling comment on the human condition."
"Writing about the modern hardboiled detective story, Raymond Chandler once said, 'We’ve taken murder out of the parlor and given it back to the people who do it best.'"
"The man with the grin is the man who will win."
"When a man’s rope slides off you once, he’s mighty cautious about making a second throw."
"It didn’t seem to me like a very good time to do much talking."
"But I started a little before I could catch myself."
"I just about had to keep on whether I wanted to or not."
"I laughed, choking on the coffee I was starting to swallow."
"We got into Central City around six in the morning."
"I sat thinking—standing outside of myself—thinking about myself and Bob Maples."
"I’d forgotten about it, and now I forgot it again."
"If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much."
"I’m just so happy, Lou. So happy I can’t stand it!"
"I shrugged, and pushed my hat back; because my forehead was sweating. But I was feeling cold inside, so cold inside."
"Conway Construction is handling the job, Lou. Doesn’t it strike you as rather odd that he’d do a job for a man whose son killed his son?"
"It’s a turnkey job. Conway’s jobbing all the materials, dealing with the supply houses, paying off the men. No one’s seen a nickel coming from Pappas."
"He lived close," I said. "He could have had it, a big enough part, anyway, so’s they’d wait on the rest. It didn’t need to be in a bank. He could have had it salted away around his house."
"Well—dammit, you mean that, don’t you? You mean every word of it!"
"I reckon. The church didn’t call it suicide."
"I don’t know," he said slowly. "I don’t know much about them things. Maybe—you reckon you could swing a loan on it?"
"I knew I had to kill Amy; I could put the reason into words. But every time I thought about it, I had to stop and think why again."
"It was like being asleep when you were awake and awake when you were asleep."
"What are you going to say when you’re drowning in your own dung and they keep booting you back into it, when all the screams in hell wouldn’t be as loud as you want to scream?"
"I smoked a hand-rolled cigarette, and it tasted good."
"There's just not much they can put their hands on, know what I mean?"
"They might be any one of those three things, because the symptoms we show would fit any one of the three."
"I thought about Rothman and Billy Boy Walker, just thought, wondered, without worrying any."
"You wouldn’t find a girl as pretty and well-built as Amy Stanton in a month of Sundays."
"But I was too anxious. I had to go and ask the nurse a question when she made the night check on me, and that spoiled everything."
"You can’t call it giving up. It’s been lost for a long time."
"I sure hate to give up, though. Just never got in the habit of giving up, I reckon."
"And he understood me better’n I understood myself."
"I reckon Billy Boy Walker’s been cussed more in high places than any man in the country."
"I guess the way you felt about him depended on where you stood."
"It was like I’d thought, of course. They had the house covered from every angle."
"All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad."
"All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland, and Johnnie Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us."
"Dirty crooks keep cheatin’ me and cheatin’ me, an’ Papa cusses me out for it!"
"Death might be forestalled if he took proper care of himself. Otherwise, he had no more than three days to live."