It is memorably summed up by Bogart in the film, when he says to the jury who will decide if Nick is executed: “Until we do away with the type of neighborhood that produced this boy, ten will spring up to take his place, a hundred, a thousand. Until we wipe out the slums and rebuild them, knock on any door and you may find Nick Romano.â€
Quotation expert Ralph Keyes speculates in his book The Quote Verifier that Motley may have been “recycling street talk†when he wrote the line “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.â€
I did some extensive online searching and found uses and variations of the phrase “live fast and die young†dating back to the early 1900s.
But I didn’t find any uses of the longer saying mentioning a corpse prior to the publication of Knock on Any Door. So, I think Motley’s book probably is the origin of that fatalistic slogan.
Personally, I prefer the Ricky Gervais variation. In an episode of The Office (the original BBC series), he says: “You know that old thing, live fast, die young? Not my way. Live fast, sure, live too bloody fast sometimes, but die young? Die old! That’s the way. Not orthodox. I don’t live by ‘the rules’ you know.â€
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