....She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable...
...You ought to wean her. She looks old enough...
...They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket...
...I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade...
...I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives...
...His blue eyes frosted. `Are you trying to tell me my duties, sir?’
   `No. But I’m having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.’...
...`And I don’t like your manners.’
   `I’m not crazy about yours,’ I said. `I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind you ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind you showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.’...
    The immediate impression is that Raymond Chandler, in his best book The Big Sleep, throws the one-liners in at about half the rate of Dashiel Hammet. And the best line in the film—`She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.’ isn’t in the book. The book lacks the flaws that somehow failed to diminish the film for the popular audience; that the plot in the movie is almost completely incomprehensible, and that there are no villains available—all of them being dead or busy committing crimes elsewhere—for one of the murders—that of the chauffer.
    This matter bears contemplation. It is considered to be the greatest error ever made in the history of movie scriptwriting, the claim mostly based on the reputation of the culprits. For this disgrace was committed by none other than William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett  and director Howard Hawks. Personally, I find it a great comfort to know that people of such genius are as capable of fucking up as are we mortals.
    My favourite line of all on the first page of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye—The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back... I well know the look he meant.