Raymond Chandler Quotes

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

The streets were dark with something more then night.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops . . . I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.

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.

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

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.

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

One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.

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

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

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?

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

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

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

You can't have everything, even in California

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.

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

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

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

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.

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

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

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

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

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

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.

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.

Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.

Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.

Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

May I wish for you the knowledge...that marriages do not take place, they are made by hand; that there is always an element of discipline involved; that however perfect the honeymoon, the time will come, however brief it is, when you wish she would fall downstairs and break a leg. This goes for her too. But the mood will pass, if you give it time.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

A really good detective never gets married.

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

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

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

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.

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.