Raymond Chandler Quotes

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

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 guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.

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

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.

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.

She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.

The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.

You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

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.

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.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.

The more you reason the less you create.

She had eyes like strange sins.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.

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.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

It is not a fragrant world.

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.

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it

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

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

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.

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

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

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.

I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.