Raymond Chandler Quotes - Page 5

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• You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.

  Raymond Chandler

  Fun, Grief, Jail

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Long Goodbye: A Novel”, p.147, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.

  Raymond Chandler

  Ifs

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• 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.

  Raymond Chandler

  Too Much, Speak, Detachment

  "A Qualified Farewell". Essay by Raymond Chandler (early 1950's), published in "The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler" edited by Frank MacShane, 1976.

  10 Copy quote

• Two very simple rules:
  A. You don't have to write.
  B. You can't do anything else
  The rest comes of itself.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Simple, Two

  Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney, Frank MacShane (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.104, Grove Press

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

  Raymond Chandler

  Men, Ideas, Technique

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.73, Univ of California Press

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• [As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Silence, Mind

  "A Qualified Farewell". Essay by Raymond Chandler (early 1950's), published in "The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler" edited by Frank MacShane, 1976.

  7 Copy quote

• Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.

  Raymond Chandler

  Struggle, Two, Nine

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.70, Univ of California Press

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• The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.

  Raymond Chandler

  Attitude, Integrity, Gentleman

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.150, Univ of California Press

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• The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Style, Investment

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.75, Univ of California Press

  12 Copy quote

• The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.

  Raymond Chandler

  Drinking, Boys, Community

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.64, Grove Press

  9 Copy quote

• I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

  Raymond Chandler

  Brother, Couple, Divorce

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Long Goodbye: A Novel”, p.87, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

  Raymond Chandler

  Art, Struggle, Writing

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.82, Univ of California Press

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• The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Personality, Perception

  Raymond Chandler (1987). “Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler”, Delta

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• Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid

  Raymond Chandler

  Hero, Mean, Men

  "The Simple Art of Murder," Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1944

  84 Copy quote

• Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.

  Raymond Chandler

  Mean, Hands, People

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Simple Art of Murder”, p.19, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• 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

  Art, Growth, Population

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Simple Art of Murder”, p.5, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

  Raymond Chandler

  Winter, Grieving, Long

  The Big Sleep ch. 3 (1939)

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• In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

  Raymond Chandler

  Art, Strong, Laughter

  "The Simple Art of Murder," Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1944

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• You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.

  Raymond Chandler

  Sleep, Caring, Oil And Water

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Big Sleep: A Novel”, p.230, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops . . . I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.

  Raymond Chandler

  Smart, Thinking, Hatred

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• Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than you'll do the truth good. Or until I'm hauled before somebody that can make me talk.

  Raymond Chandler

  Fall, Guy, Soul

  Raymond Chandler (2014). “The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words”, p.123, Vintage

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• The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

  Raymond Chandler

  Strong, Coffee, Smell

  Raymond Chandler (2011). “The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely”, p.369, Modern Library

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• 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

  Art, Men, Creative

  Raymond Chandler (1987). “Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler”, Delta

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• 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

  Cute, Boys, Murder Victims

  Raymond Chandler (1983). “The Chandler Collection: Pearls are a nuisance ; Smart-aleck kill ; Killer in the rain”

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• 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

  Alive, Gentle, Hard

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “Playback: A Novel”, p.200, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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