James Crumley quotes:

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.

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.

Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.

Lady bartenders live a tougher life than anybody knows. -- Dancing Bear

Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never Go back to Texas again

Home is where you hang your hangover.

Consideration touches more deeply and longer than passion.

I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

I try to stay two drinks ahead of reality and three behind a drunk

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

The only person more cynical than a drunk is a reformed drunk.

There's no accounting for laws. Or the changes wrought by men and time.

...the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.