Carmen Sternwood: You're not very tall are you?
Philip Marlowe: Well, I, uh, I try to be.
Ida: Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.
James Temple: Are you thieves or what? You want money, is this a robbery?
Toots: Yeah, Pop, we're gonna steal all your towels.
Herbie Hawkins: Well, if I was gonna kill you, I wouldn't do a dumb thing like hitting you on the head. First of all, I don't like the fingerprint angle. Of course, I could always wear gloves. Press your hands against the pipe after you were dead and make you look like a suicide. Except it don't seem hardly likely that you'd beat yourself to death with a club. I'd murder you so it didn't look like murder.
Mark McPherson: I suspect nobody and everybody. I am strictly trying to get at the truth.
Rachel Cooper: Women are such durn fools.
Leona Stevenson: Henry! Henry! Save me.
Johnny Clay: You'd be killing a horse - that's not first degree murder, in fact it's not murder at all, in fact I don't know what it is.
John Simpson: Cosgrave! Must you pace up and down like a monkey in a ruddy cage?
Alan Cosgrave: I fail to see how what I do can concern you!
Bruce Alastair: Simpson! Cosgrave! Cannot we behave like Good Comrades?
John Simpson: Doesn't anything ever get on your nerves, Alistair?
Bruce Alastair: Oh dear me, no. I have no nerves.
Bruno Anthony: I have a theory that you should do everything before you die.
Joe Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I am big! It's the pictures that got small.
Police Inspector Nakajima: Bad luck either makes a man or destroys him. Are you gonna let it destroy you? Depending how you take it, bad luck can be a big break.
David Sutton: My liver rushes in where angels fear to tread.
Johnny: There's only two things in this world that a 'real man' needs: a cup of coffee and a good smoke.
Harry Lime: What did you want me to do? Be reasonable. You didn't expect me to give myself up... 'It's a far, far better thing that I do.' The old limelight. The fall of the curtain. Oh, Holly, you and I aren't heroes. The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories.
Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven't got any.
Quinlan: Hmm? What do you mean?
Tanya: Your future's all used up.
Sherlock Holmes: The young lady is taking her mother to Scotland for burial.
Inspector Lestrade: In a coffin?
Sherlock Holmes: That is the customary method, I believe.
George Loomis: Too bad, they can't play it for you now, Rose.
Barton Keyes: Walter, you're all washed up.
Lt. Ted Wilks: It was bad judgment to bother a cop's widow about the love life of her husband.
Dave Bannion: Good or bad, it was my judgment.
Lt. Ted Wilks: You're missing the point. I'm the one that gets the pressure calls from upstairs. I'm the one that has to explain. You don't keep an office like this very long stepping on a lot of corns.
Dave Bannion: You want me to go upstairs and explain?
Lt. Ted Wilks: Not you. You're a corn stepper by instinct.