American novelist, journalist & screenwriter (1892-1977)
The first thing that catches your ear, when you go on a movie lot, is that these people don't say "movies," or "talkies." They say "pictures." And it is not long before you realize that this is no chance word. It states the essence of the business. That thing up there isn't primarily the record of a novel, a play, or a story. It is a series of photographed pictures. All its main problems are identical with those of the old postcard series, where a cat stalked a bird in six views, or a dog rescued a boy from the water, or a hobo stole a pie from a pantry shelf. The basis of the cinema is a photographed picture, and that it moves, or that it talks, is incidental. This moving and talking may lend verisimilitude, or variety, or divertissement for the ear, but the main thing remains: a photographed picture.
JAMES M. CAIN
60 Years of Journalism
She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.
JAMES M. CAIN
Mildred Pierce
He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Postman Always Rings Twice
I wouldn't give a damn for all the Mexican men that ever lived, but the women are marvelous. What saps their painters are, with all that beauty around them, to spend their days on war, socialism, and politics.
JAMES M. CAIN
Love's Lovely Counterfeit
They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to be cooled with spit.
JAMES M. CAIN
Mildred Pierce
We had a lovely night--oh, all right, two lovely nights and a long, dreamy day--and I'm not ashamed. Life is like that, and it has little lyric poems in it, as well as other things. But a lyric is one refrain, and there's no second verse. I loved you, for one week end, as beautifully as I'm capable of loving. But I couldn't go on with it.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Moth
In every country except this one they give it a chance. They help love, with dots and dowries and portions and whatever each family can do in the way of the connections that make life easy to live and love worth having.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Moth
Life is not all doing. It's part being.
JAMES M. CAIN
Serenade
Politics is power.... It's power to use, power to trade, power to get more power. Don't ask me why they want it.
JAMES M. CAIN
Galatea
Politics is partly deals--like this one--but it's also partly combat. If you don't like a fight, stay out.
JAMES M. CAIN
Cloud Nine
Power is capable of indefinite expansion; it feeds a lust that grows until it seems greater than the human frame can endure.
JAMES M. CAIN
60 Years of Journalism
We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction
Not every man's death is a crime.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Cocktail Waitress
He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical.
JAMES M. CAIN
Mildred Pierce
Let's get stinko.
JAMES M. CAIN
Mildred Pierce