Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye (1953)

22 Sourced Quotes

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You had to play the big scene, he said coldly. Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

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

Raymond Chandler
Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on the circulation and you know what circulation depends on.

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

Raymond Chandler
You can't tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper.

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

Raymond Chandler
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

Raymond Chandler
Then her hands dropped and jerked at something and the robe she was wearing came open and underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy.

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
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
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
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler
She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.

Raymond Chandler
You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.

Raymond Chandler
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

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