Raymond Chandler Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.
Of Los Angeles

Raymond Chandler
The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances.

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

Raymond Chandler
The registration read: Carmen Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood. I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

Raymond Chandler
I hung up.
It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.

Raymond Chandler
I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

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
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.

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
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
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus.
I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.

Raymond Chandler
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. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. 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. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler
'Okay, thees Hench no good, but poor guy, drunk, no job. Pay no rent, but I got lotsa money. So I say, Look, Hench, you make the confess. You sick man. Two three weeks sick. You go into court. I have a lawyer for you. You say to hell with the confess. I was drunk. The damn coppers are stuck. The judge he turn you loose and you come back to me and I take care of you. Okay? So Hench say okay, make the confess. That's all.'
I said: 'And after two or three weeks the bad brother is a long way from here and the trail is cold and the cops will likely just write the Phillips killing off as unsolved. Is that it?'
'Si.' He smiled again. A brilliant warm smile, like the kiss of death.

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

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

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
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.

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

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
To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips. (...) Just another four-flusher.

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

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

Raymond Chandler
The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.

Raymond Chandler
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler
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.

Raymond Chandler