[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.
Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.
The first time I fought Mike Chandler, I was thinking about money way too much. I was thinking about the end of my contract. My focus was way off. I didn't believe in the people that were guiding me.
My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.
And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.
I was thinking about all these things and more, but I wasn't really thinking about them at all. They were just there, floating around in the back of my mind, thinking about themselves. What I was really thinking about, of course, was Lucas.
You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.
Walt Disney was a story man, and he knew that we were thinking story. That's why he dug us so much and he hired us to work for him. We always thought about the story. That was more important than any words and any music. That's all it's about.
You can't really think about more than one movie at a time. You're thinking about it consciously, and the subconscious is working too, and if you cram too much into your head, you don't get any ideas in the shower.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.
Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.
When you're doing a series, you're really in a zone. You're thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it's just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they're thinking about.