Top 232 Quotes & Sayings by Raymond Chandler
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Raymond Chandler.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
The streets were dark with something more than night.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
It is not a fragrant world.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
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.
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.
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
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.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
I certainly admire people who do things.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
A really good detective never gets married.
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
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.
The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
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.
The more you reason the less you create.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
Two very simple rules:
A. You don't have to write.
B. You can't do anything else
The rest comes of itself.
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
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
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.
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.
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
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.
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
I'm killing time and it's dying hard.
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.
If you believe in an idea, you don't own you, it owns you.
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.
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.
The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had
To say goodbye is to die a little.
The streets were dark with something more then night.
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