Hard Boiled Quotes & Sayings

I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Brillat-Savarin claimed to have seen the vicar of Bregnier eat the following within forty-five minutes: a bowl of soup, two dishes of boiled beef, a leg of mutton, a handsome capon, a generous salad, a ninety-degree wedge from a good-sized white cheese, a bottle of wine, and a carafe of water. If Brillat-Savarin was not exaggerating, the amount of food eaten by the vicar in less than an hour would have provided enough calories for a day or more. It is hard to imagine a wild chimpanzee achieving such a feat. — Richard W. Wrangham

I need to eat before a workout. If I exercise in the morning, I'll have a little oatmeal, cereal, or a hard-boiled egg with toast. If I go in the afternoon, I'll eat a turkey sandwich with cheese for lunch. — Ana Ortiz

Most hard-boiled people are half-baked. — Wilson Mizner

Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws. — Haruki Murakami

I believe everything in moderation. But breakfast is important. I have two hard-boiled or scrambled eggs with whole-wheat toast and try to get some fruit in there. — Martina Mcbride

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be
these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain
battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang. — C.S. Woolley

The Negro problem, like all other political problems, is fundamentally a moral issue. This is realism, not idealism. Those of my colleagues who believe that they are particularly 'hard boiled' because they overlook the fact that human beings are struggling for their consciences are simply unrealistic. — Gunnar Myrdal

Jess:"Sasha? I need some tissue to pack my nose with."
Sasha:"Is that hygienically sound?"
Jess:"Sasha ... "
Sasha:"Fine, but if you get toxic shock up your nose, buddy, remember I warned you."
Jess pulled a couple out and wedged them into his nostrils. He gave Abigail a sheepish smile. "Sexy, right?"
Abby: "Oh yeah, baby. You're so hot right now, if I was a chicken I'd lay hard-boiled eggs. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

nearby New York or distant Beijing, but whenever I was in town, I'd call to say I was on my way. Each time I'd arrive, she'd already have covered half the dining room table with the kind of items I only seemed to consume with her. They were a reflection of her more traditional fare from the old world - hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, herring in brine, black bread and cream cheese. We'd supplement this with ethnic staples — Leon Berger

The Chinese went to their knees trying desperately to get their rifles into action, but the Mongols were on them too fast. Abusing their horses cruelly, they drove them right in among the riflemen, and men were kicked, stamped upon and died beneath frantic hooves. — Walter Kaylin

There's this secret Korean taco/cupcake truck I go to. To find it, you have to bring a hard-boiled egg to this deli in Bushwick where they give you the address. — Kurt Braunohler

Howard got sex-crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab's Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty's yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes's
one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises' fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself. — James Ellroy

My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it. — Judy Nichols

A good choreographer is one that's going to collaborate, teach, guide - everything. The wonderful thing on 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' was that we had Philip Kwok - he choreographed John Woo's 'Hard Boiled,' and in the '70s, he was a martial arts actor, stunt man, fighter, choreographer in Hong Kong. — Mark Dacascos

They went along a balcony that looked down over the dining room and the dance floor. The lisp of hot jazz came up to them from the lithe, swaying bodies of a high-yaller band. With the lisp of jazz came the smell of food and cigarette smoke and perspiration. The balcony was high and the scene down below had a patterned look, like an overhead camera shot. (Nevada Gas) — Raymond Chandler

Crackers, toasted or hard bread may be added a short time before the soup is wanted; but do not put in those libels on civilized cookery, called DUMPLINGS! One might about as well eat, with the hope of digesting, a brick from the ruins of Babylon, as one of the hard, heavy masses of boiled dough which usually pass under this name. — Sarah Josepha Hale

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing. — Megan Abbott

Cry Wolf' is a hard-boiled thriller written at break-neck pace of political corruption and organised, very violent crime. — Mike Ripley

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics. — John Banville

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. — Ernest Hemingway,

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films. — Ed McBain

Tourists - have some fun with New york's hard-boiled cabbies. When you get to your destination, say to your driver, "Pay? I was hitchhiking." — David Letterman

Carli's was a small club at the end of a passage between a sporting-goods store and a circulating library. There was a grilled door and a man behind it who had given up trying to look as if it mattered who came in. (Smart-Aleck Kill) — Raymond Chandler

You always had an eye for the fellow with a decent helping of sausage and hard-boiled eggs. — Gregory Maguire

Soon they were all sitting on the rocky ledge, which was still warm, watching the sun go down into the lake. It was the most beautiful evening, with the lake as blue as a cornflower and the sky flecked with rosy clouds. They held their hard-boiled eggs in one hand and a piece of bread and butter in the other, munching happily. There was a dish of salt for everyone to dip their eggs into.

'I don't know why, but the meals we have on picnics always taste so much nicer than the ones we have indoors,' said George. — Enid Blyton

Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses? — William Lindsay Gresham

Anytime I fall for a dame like you I hope that somebody will take me outside an' cut my head off quick because I would rather be tied up to a coupla wild alligators than get myself hitched on to you. — Peter Cheyney

When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no. — V.T. Davy

The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel and shapes it into something new. — George Pelecanos

The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow) — Raymond Chandler

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed. — Christopher Hitchens

The fact that he gave her the creeps just proved she was normal. He had the flat, dead face of an item turned out by machines. His eyes were cold as marbles pressed into dough. His insides went with the surface. He could beat a man insane or take it himself, and it didn't mean a thing to him. — Walter Kaylin

I try to be a hard boiled sometimes. My kids see right through it. I'm acting. It's always, 'When I say you'll be back at 11, that means 11, not 11.15. Do you hear me!?' Then, 'Yeah, Dad.' — Liam Neeson

The test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are fantastic, fabulous. Sometimes as hard as a 100 carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me. — Nancy Mitford

From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed. The silk was tight and under it the muscles worked slow and easy. I saw weight there, and control, and, brother, those are things I like in a woman. — Jonathan Latimer

Masters, holding aloft a hard-boiled egg from the free lunch as if it were a crystal ball, said, "Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?" Smiling, they shook their heads. "I'll bet you haven't. Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They're just around the corner, in the next corridor; they're in the next book, the one you haven't read, or in the next stack, the one you haven't got to. But you'll get to it someday. And when you do - when you do - " He looked at the egg for a moment more, then took a large bite of it and turned to Stoner, his jaws working and his dark eyes bright. — John Edward Williams

Common sense says go home and forget it, no money coming in. Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up — Raymond Chandler

What I'm trying to do is save your ass, gorgeous. — Massimo Carlotto

Her voice was as dead as the summer before last. (Nevada Gas) — Raymond Chandler

A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound - after the sound of a gun. (Guns at Cyrano's) — Raymond Chandler

Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting. — Tanya Luhrmann

It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. — Haruki Murakami

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City Hotel. — Cornell Woolrich

The car slid along Los Angeles to Fifth, east to San Pedro, south again for block after block, quiet blocks and loud blocks, blocks where silent men sat on shaky front porches and blocks where noisy young toughs of both colors snarled and wise-cracked at one another in front of cheap restaurants and drug-stores and beer parlors full of slot machines. (Pickup on Noon Street) — Raymond Chandler

She wasn't hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn't move. — Nathanael West

She was in trouble, and she passed it on to me like an infection and standing here in the rain I didn't give a damn. — A.S. Fleischman

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant. — Haruki Murakami

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can't live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin' wide in the turns. — Daniel Woodrell

You know who they are?" Tony said softly. "I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right." (I'll be waiting) — Raymond Chandler

His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in. (Guns at Cyrano's) — Raymond Chandler

I'm asking about the kid," Root said. "What does she get out of it?"
"My fist in her ear if she asks as many questions as you do," Pennant said. "You worry too much. Well, what do you say, Sultan? — Walter Kaylin

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many. — Avi

Listen Charles, if blondes were poison, I'd have died thirty years ago. — Jonathan Latimer

The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so
completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm
who was not perfectly well aware that publicity - advertising - is
the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red
lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial
honour and usefulness. But such things would have been laughed at
in the New Albion. Most of the employees were the hard-boiled,
Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is
sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The
public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a
swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final
naivete, the blind worship of the money-god. — George Orwell

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

A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood (Guns at Cyrano's) — Raymond Chandler

You are an enigma, Avery Morgansten."
I leaned against the counter, my eyes widening as he proceeded to eat half the loaf. "Not really. More like you are."
"How so?"
I gestured at him. "You just ate four hard-boiled eggs, you're eating half a loaf, and you have abs that look like they belong on a Bowflex ad."
Cam looked absolutely thrilled to hear that. "You've been checking me out, haven't you? In between your flaming insults? I feel like man candy."
I laughed. "Shut up."
"I'm a growing boy. — J. Lynn

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing. — Ernest Hemingway,

Her bosom filled the jacket like a pair of boxing gloves stuck inside it. — Walter Kaylin

I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy. — Haruki Murakami

It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most ot endanger the harmonious progress of democracy. — B.C. Forbes

It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed. — Walter Mosley

Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either. — Haruki Murakami

The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer. — Anton Chekhov

The noise of horns and radios and shouted insults was part of the soundtrack of the capital (Hard-boiled P.I. Casta, on Rome, Italy) — Tobias Jones

She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore. — Lawrence Block

Do I have to do everything myself?" The cry was a soul-freezing mixture of rage and torment. "Ain't there no one to stop asking questions and just do my bidding? By God, I'll kill and kill and kill and kill and never stop killing if people don't do what I say. I'll beat you dummies till the blood runs out of your eyes. I'll tie every man on this godforsaken island to a tree and he'll bark like a dog for me to throw him a bone. — Walter Kaylin

Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy. — Haruki Murakami

When I made 'Hard Boiled,' I had no idea that it would be released to an international audience. I just wanted to make a film to team up my two favorite actors, Tony Leung and Chow Yun-Fat. — John Woo

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea. — Dana Stabenow

Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity. — Christopher G. Moore

They were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy) — Tobias Jones

I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face. — Ryu Murakami

Hard-boiled eggs are wonderful when they're really done right. I bring the water to a boil, and then I put in the eggs. And then I boil them for - well, it depends on the size of the egg - maybe eight minutes. — Alice Waters

The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern. — Mickey Wyte

Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around. — Lawrence Block

PARKER spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, ...
Beat that for a PC opening line ... not — Richard Stark

Bosch had left Nigeria with his infamous Butcher Boys - assorted sizes, shapes and colors, but all killers for a price - when his scheme to take over a native village backfired. He had figured on cleaning up by selling the village girls in the Congo but found himself dodging spears, knives and related items of cutlery instead. — Walter Kaylin

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. — Raymond Chandler

Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg! — Terry Pratchett

CEREMONY OF FLIES hits the road like a nitrous-fueled GTO ... and then pulls the ultimate stunt of getting better. What starts as a deceptively simple hard-boiled noir story twists on itself and adds layers and grows stranger and before you know it, BAM - it's the end of the world and all you can do is hang on by your fingernails. This really, truly is one of the best novellas I've read in years. — Lisa Morton

Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. (The King in Yellow) — Raymond Chandler

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes ... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations — Aldo Leopold

Don't stop,' said Lymond pleasantly. 'You've my father, my brother, my late sister and a whole clecking of aunts to get through. Auntie May is a good one to start with. Fifteen stone, and every spring she goes broody; and we find her out in the hen run on a clutch of burst yolks; except the year mother got there first and hard-boiled them. — Dorothy Dunnett

I edited that [men's adventure] stuff, I read it all. I went from that to The Saturday Evening Post. The very first day at the Post, I edited a piece by John O'Hara and Hannah Arendt. She said, 'Come on, vat are you doink?'

"I said, 'You're okay Arendt, but you're no Walter Kaylin. — Mel Shestack

The Libertarian Party convention wasn't much better. You will never find a more stammering, awkward, inarticulate group of people than libertarians. I still remember the convention the previous year, entitled 'Women of Liberty.' All of the speakers were women, and all of the topics boiled down to 'Effectively Communicating Libertarian Ideas to Women' - in other words, 'How to talk to girls.' Looking around at the nearly entirely white male audience, it wasn't hard to see why they chose this tack. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. — Haruki Murakami

Tono Phul used to entertain his guests by having the Filipino break two by fours in half with his karate chops. I saw him break a desk apart that way. Once, Tono Phul put him in a cage with an orangutan. The Filipino broke the ape's neck and then kicked it to death. He was the worst thing that ever came down the pike, and when Tono Phul had him tie me to a pool table and work me over, I was sure my time had come. — Walter Kaylin

It quickly became apparent that the Germans were interested in using our strength but not in preserving it. We received a ration of "flower coffee" - made not from coffee beans but from flowers, or maybe acorns. We each had half a loaf of bread, which had to last us from Sunday to Wednesday. At midday, we had a cold soup made from broken asparagus that couldn't be sold, or a mustard soup with potatoes, and maybe a hard-boiled egg. At night, we had a milk soup; on lucky days, it contained some oatmeal. — Edith Hahn Beer

As Rosa rolled the hard boiled egg across my forehead I wasn't as disturbed as you might think, even though I was sitting on a plastic table in a five star hotel bathroom in my underwear, being chattered at in Spanish by a lady I'd met only the day before in the herb and flower market. The truth is, I've probably done stranger things in hotel bathrooms. — Becky Wicks

The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed. (I'll be waiting) — Raymond Chandler

It was twenty-five minutes past nine when he got to the corner of Seventh and Spring, where the Metropole was. It was an old hotel that had once been exclusive and was now steering a shaky course between a receivership and a bad name at Headquarters. It had too much oily dark wood paneling, too many chipped gilt mirrors. Too much smoke hung below its low beamed lobby ceiling and too many grifters bummed around in its worn leather rockers. The blonde who looked after the big horseshoe cigar counter wasn't young any more and her eyes were cynical from standing off cheap dates. (Nevada Gas) — Raymond Chandler

You're about to meet a new great dame of crime fiction in Death Was the Other Woman. Linda L. Richards does a stunning job in creating a character with a voice and eye right out of a 1930s L.A. hard-boiled classic: guns and gams, booze and bodies, peepers and perps. Move over, Sam Spade: Kitty Pangborn is on the case. — Linda Fairstein

She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it — Raymond Chandler

I've always thought hard-boiled detective novels an American art form. At their best, they're more than who-dun-its or thrillers, they're vehicles for a writer's observations about culture, politics, philosophy, music, history and a time or a place. Or life, it's ownself. When you read James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett or James Lee Burke, their stories are always about far more than good guys chasing bad guys. That's the kind of book I wanted to write. Still do. — Jim Nesbitt

I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. — Raymond Chandler

The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. — Raymond Chandler

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most. — Paul Auster