Raymond Chandler Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

  Raymond Chandler

  Baseball, Communication, Player

  Raymond Chandler (1995). “Later Novels & Other Writings”

• 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

  Two, Language, Kind

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.80, Univ of California Press

• They write them long because they can't write them short.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Writing, Long

• 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

  Men, Looks, Speech

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Simple Art of Murder”, p.20, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

• 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

  Delicate Things, People, Language

  Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney, Frank MacShane (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.35, Grove Press

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