Raymond Chandler famous quotes

To say goodbye is to die a little.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Goodbye #Saying Goodbye #Littles

All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Reading #Entertainment #Pleasure

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Nice #Habit #Bad Habits

I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Beer #Guy #Wake Up

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Beauty #Glasses #Bishops

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Heart #Men #Broken

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Girl #Looks #Four

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Doors #Enough #Desks

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Morning #Writing #Typewriters

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Stories

I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Hate #Cat #Thinking

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Air #Theatre #Four

Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Men #Police #Problem

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Angel #Cooking #Tarantulas

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Goodbye #Saying Goodbye #Littles

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Drinking #Funny Drinking #Whiskey

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement
-- Raymond Chandler

#Challenges #Half #Littles

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Traps

The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Cute #Boys #Two

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Gun #Men

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Drinking #Beer #Men

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had
-- Raymond Chandler

#People #Trying #Half

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Care #Sober #Neat

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)
-- Raymond Chandler

#Doors #Hands #Pie

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Years #Want

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Littles #Significant

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Agency #Chess #Waste

Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Eye #Loss

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Crazy #Hollywood #Wonderful

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Struggle #Years

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Husband #Party #Beer

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Cutting #Thinking

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
-- Raymond Chandler

#California #States #Stores

The more you reason the less you create.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Success #Creativity #Ideas

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Fawns #Might

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Book #Character #Emotional

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Jobs #Wall #Nice

Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be." Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Mean #Eye #Thinking

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Reading #Character #Guy

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Style #Investment

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Stars #Space #Numbness

Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Said

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Fog #Trying #Sound

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Long #Gone #Way

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #People #Style

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #War #Emotional

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Quality #Redemption

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Age #Literature #Kind

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Splits #Infinitive

If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Alive #Gentle #Deserve

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture
-- Raymond Chandler

#Men #Artist #Creative

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Hangover #Alcohol

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Two #People #Way

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Gun #Needs #Said

The streets were dark with something more then night.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Dark #Night #Streets

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Death #Littles #Woe

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Country #Home #Gun

As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Men #Style #Going Out

California, the department store state.
-- Raymond Chandler

#California #Dignity #States

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Writing #Desire

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Writing #Passion #Technique

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Too Much #Speak #Enough

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Useless

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Integrity #Magic

A really good detective never gets married.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Police #Detectives #Married

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Girl #Sin #Smooth

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Struggle #Writing #Suspense

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Smile #Laughter #Laughing

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world
-- Raymond Chandler

#Hero #Mean #Men

The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Growth #Way

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Two #Kind #Language

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Dying #Killing #Time To Kill

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Class #Play

The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Powerful #Adventure #Self

The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn't take things too much to heart.  He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself.  He should do the best he can without straining at it.  He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return.  He won't get it.  And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Wise #Goodbye #Honesty

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
-- Raymond Chandler

#Taken #Writing #Men

If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Community #World #Tough

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Book #Writing #Average

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Appreciation #Art #Writing

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.
-- Raymond Chandler

#New York #Writing #Criticism

You can't tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Book #Drug #Vegetarian

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Real #Men #Fiction

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Loneliness #Heart #Essence

Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on the circulation and you know what circulation depends on.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Sex #Hate #Mean

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Money #Men #May

Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Book #Views #Blood

Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Fashion #Cat #Tree

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
-- Raymond Chandler

#War #Civilization #Giving

They write them long because they can't write them short.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Book #Writing #Long

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Men #Forests #Nasty

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Tvs #Hats #Detectives

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Jobs #Writing #Perfect

If you liked a book, don't meet the author
-- Raymond Chandler

#Book #Literature

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
-- Raymond Chandler

#War #Moving #Agency

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Honesty #Writing #Men

You can't have everything, even in California
-- Raymond Chandler

#Inspiration #California

The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Real #Perfect #Trying

An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Art #Want #Lovers

Dames lie about anything - just for practice.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Lying #Practice #Dames

If you believe in an idea, you don't own you, it owns you.
-- Raymond Chandler

#Believe #Ideas #If You Believe