Raymond Chandler Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler
We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk." —

Raymond Chandler
The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement

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
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.

Raymond Chandler
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.

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

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

Raymond Chandler
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Raymond Chandler
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Raymond Chandler
I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They'd get around to it.

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

Raymond Chandler
The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

Raymond Chandler
He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.

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

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

Raymond Chandler
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.

Raymond Chandler
It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Raymond Chandler
The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives.

Raymond Chandler
I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

Raymond Chandler
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.

Raymond Chandler