Category: The Big Sleep

Eddie Mars: Convenient, the door being open when you didn’t have a key, eh?
Philip Marlowe: Yeah, wasn’t it. By the way, how’d you happen to have one?
Eddie Mars: Is that any of your business?
Philip Marlowe: I could make it my business.
Eddie Mars: I could make your business mine.
Philip Marlowe: Oh, you wouldn’t like it. The pay’s too small.

General Sternwood: Do you like orchids?
Philip Marlowe: Not particularly.
General Sternwood: Ugh. Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

Norris: Are you attempting to tell me my duties sir?
Marlowe: No just having fun trying to guess what they are.

Philip Marlowe: Oh, Eddie, you don’t have anybody watching me, do you? Tailing me in a gray Plymouth coupe, maybe?
Eddie Mars: No, why should I?
Philip Marlowe: Well, I can’t imagine, unless you’re worried about where I am all the time.
Eddie Mars: I don’t like you that well.

Vivian: How did you find her?
Marlowe: I didn’t find her.
Vivian: Well then how did you—
Marlowe: I haven’t been here, you haven’t seen me, and she hasn’t been out of the house all evening.

Vivian: You go too far, Marlowe.
Marlowe: Those are harsh words to throw at a man, especially when he’s walking out of your bedroom.

Marlowe: You know what he’ll do when he comes back? Beat my teeth out, then kick me in the stomach for mumbling.

Philip Marlowe: What’s wrong with you?
Vivian: Nothing you can’t fix.

Norris: How do you like your brandy, sir?
Philip Marlowe: In a glass.

Philip Marlowe: I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. I don’t like them myself. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.

Philip Marlowe: My, my, my. Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains!

Vivian: Why did you have to go on?
Marlowe: Too many people told me to stop.