Top 100 Chandler Raymond Quotes
#1. 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
#2. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#3. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
Raymond Chandler
#4. In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
Raymond Chandler
#5. I walked along to the double doors and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn't any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.
Raymond Chandler
#7. There was a time when actors went in at the back door. Most of them still should.
Raymond Chandler
#9. He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.
Raymond Chandler
#10. That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.
Raymond Chandler
#11. Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.
Raymond Chandler
#12. If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."
"Caterpillar blood," I said.
Raymond Chandler
#13. You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.
Raymond Chandler
#14. 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
#15. Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram.
Raymond Chandler
#16. If Raymond Chandler came from the South, his name would be Ace Atkins.
Kinky Friedman
#17. As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style.
Raymond Chandler
#19. When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
Raymond Chandler
#20. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed. (I'll be waiting)
Raymond Chandler
#21. Seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
Raymond Chandler
#22. There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
Raymond Chandler
#23. You like it in jail?'
'It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?
Raymond Chandler
#24. 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
#25. It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
Raymond Chandler
#26. The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants.
Raymond Chandler
#27. There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop.
Raymond Chandler
#28. She's a nice girl. Not my type." "You don't like them nice?" He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. "I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin." "They take you to the cleaners," Randall said indifferently.
Raymond Chandler
#29. I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.
Raymond Chandler
#30. Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.
Raymond Chandler
#31. A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound - after the sound of a gun. (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#32. Kind of smart guesser, ain't you, young man? Can't wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly." "I'm sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us - " "This here young man don't seem to have no trouble keepin' his mouth in place." "He's married," I said. "He's had practice.
Raymond Chandler
#33. 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
#34. But sometimes when you are getting nowhere, you have to give the wasps' nest a wallop
Benjamin Black
#35. 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
#36. It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.'
'That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said.
Raymond Chandler
#37. I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler
#38. 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
#39. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
#40. I'm a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn't gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.
Raymond Chandler
#42. She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded.
Raymond Chandler
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called 'significant literature' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
Raymond Chandler
#47. 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
#48. I'm a copper," he said. "Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.
Raymond Chandler
#49. I wouldn't say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors
Raymond Chandler
#50. Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
Raymond Chandler
#51. Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.
Raymond Chandler
#52. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.
Raymond Chandler
#53. 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
#54. The stores along Hollywood Boulevard were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible- it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early.
Raymond Chandler
#55. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)
Raymond Chandler
#58. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
#60. Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
Raymond Chandler
#62. The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
Raymond Chandler
#63. You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
Raymond Chandler
#64. 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
#65. No trial, no sensational headlines, no mud-slinging just to sell newspapers without the slightest regard for truth or fair play or for the feelings of innocent people.
Raymond Chandler
#66. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Raymond Chandler
#67. Her hand was small and had shape, not the usual bony garden tool you see on women nowadays.
Raymond Chandler
#68. 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
#69. I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there's one thing you can be sure of - you're a late comer to the show.
Raymond Chandler
#70. I don't like your manner," Kingsley said in a voice you could have crack a Brazil nut on.
"That's all right," I said. "I'm not selling it.
Raymond Chandler
#71. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased
the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
Raymond Chandler
#72. 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
#74. The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
Raymond Chandler
#75. His clothes looked as if they had cost a great deal of money and had been slept in. (Guns at Cyrano's)
Raymond Chandler
#76. Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.
Lou Reed
#77. 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
#78. He looked earnestly at me, as if that was important to me.
Raymond Chandler
#79. Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.
Raymond Chandler
#80. I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don't read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike ... I threw the paper into the corner and turned on the TV set. After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good.
Raymond Chandler
#81. A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
Raymond Chandler
#82. However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody's eye.
Raymond Chandler
#83. They don't have gangsters in Bay City. They're all working in pictures.
Raymond Chandler
#84. She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting. I
Raymond Chandler
#85. Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
Raymond Chandler
#86. 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
#87. She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it
Raymond Chandler
#88. And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
Connie Willis
#89. I did it for you. I took in a pint of bourbon with me. 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 tire, rim and all.
Raymond Chandler
#90. Trouble is my business," I said. "How else would I make a nickel?
Raymond Chandler
#92. I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
Raymond Chandler
#93. It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.
Raymond Chandler
#95. Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.
Raymond Chandler
#96. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.
Raymond Chandler
#97. 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
#98. She sighed. "All men are the same." "So are all women - after the first nine.
Raymond Chandler
#99. She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
Raymond Chandler
#100. They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don't find out they don't know themselves.
Raymond Chandler
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