Raymond Chandler Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler
There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.

Raymond Chandler
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Raymond Chandler
A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

Raymond Chandler
Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler
The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head.

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

Raymond Chandler
You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf balls... how in the world do you do it?

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

Raymond Chandler
We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did.

Raymond Chandler
The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Raymond Chandler
Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

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

Raymond Chandler
[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Raymond Chandler
As elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
On chess

Raymond Chandler
James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.

Raymond Chandler
I regard psychiatry as fifty per cent bunk, thirty per cent fraud, ten per cent 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 it.

Raymond Chandler
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.

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

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. 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. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.

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

Raymond Chandler
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.

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

Raymond Chandler
There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.

Raymond Chandler
Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God's days are very, very long?

Raymond Chandler
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with.

Raymond Chandler