Raymond Chandler Quotes

Dames lie about anything - just for practice.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

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

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

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

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

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

California, the department store state.

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

I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.

Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.

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

Shake your business up and pour it. I haven't got all day.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

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

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.

All reading for pleasure is entertainment.

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

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

A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

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.

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.

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.

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

A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

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

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

You can't have everything, even in California

The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.

They write them long because they can't write them short.

But nothing seems to do any good.

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

Could she *be* anymore out of my league?

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