Top 100 Raymond Chandler Quotes
#1. His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in. (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#2. I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent 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.
Raymond Chandler
#3. Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.
Raymond Chandler
#4. The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
Raymond Chandler
#7. Oh sure, I'm her husband. That's what the record says. I'm the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse.
Raymond Chandler
#8. She sighed. "All men are the same." "So are all women - after the first nine.
Raymond Chandler
#9. What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
Raymond Chandler
#10. A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#11. He looked earnestly at me, as if that was important to me.
Raymond Chandler
#12. The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
Raymond Chandler
#13. When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
Raymond Chandler
#14. As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style.
Raymond Chandler
#15. She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man's tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread.
Raymond Chandler
#16. If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."
"Caterpillar blood," I said.
Raymond Chandler
#17. Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway.
Raymond Chandler
#18. Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
Raymond Chandler
#19. The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.
Raymond Chandler
#20. 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
#21. I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission." "I get it," I said. "I'm stupid. It sank in after a while.
Raymond Chandler
#22. 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.
Raymond Chandler
#23. I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler
#24. Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
Raymond Chandler
#25. 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. Light
Raymond Chandler
#26. 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; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
Raymond Chandler
#27. Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character.
Raymond Chandler
#29. The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
Raymond Chandler
#30. Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn't fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.
Raymond Chandler
#34. I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot dangling.
Raymond Chandler
#35. If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.
Raymond Chandler
#36. The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
Raymond Chandler
#37. His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.
Raymond Chandler
#38. 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
#40. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
Raymond Chandler
#41. There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican.
Raymond Chandler
#42. As for asking favors or handouts, no.'
But you'll take them from a stranger.'
He looked me straight in the eye. 'The stranger can keep going and pretend not to hear.
Raymond Chandler
#43. I said: "Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish.
Raymond Chandler
#44. The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.
Raymond Chandler
#45. I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.
Raymond Chandler
#46. Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy. "Ever kill a man, Marlowe?" "Yes." "Nasty feeling, isn't it?" "Some people like it." His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they looked vague. "How could they?
Raymond Chandler
#47. 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
#51. What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.
Raymond Chandler
#52. American girls are terrific. American wives take too damn much territory.
Raymond Chandler
#53. The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face.
'What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?'
'There are ladies present.
Raymond Chandler
#54. Her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution.
Raymond Chandler
#55. You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.
Raymond Chandler
#56. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
Raymond Chandler
#57. The living room was still dark, because of the heavy growth of the shrubbery the owner had allowed to mask the windows. I put a lamp on and mooched a cigarette. I lit it. I stared down at him. I rumpled my hair which was already rumpled. I put the old tired grin on my face.
Raymond Chandler
#58. I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.
Raymond Chandler
#59. The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.
Raymond Chandler
#60. Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.
Raymond Chandler
#61. I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.
Raymond Chandler
#62. Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get ...
Raymond Chandler
#63. I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
Raymond Chandler
#64. Sooner or later I may figure out why you like being a kept poodle.
Raymond Chandler
#65. She'd make for a jazzy week-end, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet.
Raymond Chandler
#66. Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
Raymond Chandler
#68. The daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early. It would be terrible anyway; it always is. It
Raymond Chandler
#69. Police business," he said almost gently, "is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get - and we get things like this.
Raymond Chandler
#70. She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.
Raymond Chandler
#71. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.
Raymond Chandler
#72. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
Raymond Chandler
#73. I'm part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part Filipino, and part nigger. You'd hate to be me
Raymond Chandler
#74. I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
Raymond Chandler
#75. The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
(A Qualified Farewell)
Raymond Chandler
#76. At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
#78. 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.
Raymond Chandler
#79. It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Raymond Chandler
#80. 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
#81. 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.
Raymond Chandler
#82. I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability.
Raymond Chandler
#83. She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.
Raymond Chandler
#85. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.
Raymond Chandler
#86. The kid poured him another straight rye and I think he doctored it with water down behind the bar because when he came up with it he looked as guilty as if he'd kicked his grandmother.
Raymond Chandler
#87. Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.
Raymond Chandler
#88. He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
Raymond Chandler
#89. I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview.
Raymond Chandler
#90. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
Raymond Chandler
#93. On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.
Raymond Chandler
#95. An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler
#96. Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
Raymond Chandler
#97. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.
Raymond Chandler
#98. She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term I'll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.
Raymond Chandler
#100. Tsk, tsk," I said, not moving at all. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail. Put it down and don't be silly, Joe.
Raymond Chandler
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