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Quotes by Raymond Chandler

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
– Raymond Chandler
A really good detective never gets married.
– Raymond Chandler
Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
– Raymond Chandler
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
– Raymond Chandler
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
– Raymond Chandler
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
– Raymond Chandler
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
– Raymond Chandler
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
– Raymond Chandler
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
– Raymond Chandler
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
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
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 passT before it gets into print.
– Raymond Chandler
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
– Raymond Chandler
It is not a fragrant world.
– Raymond Chandler
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
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
– Raymond Chandler
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
– Raymond Chandler
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
– Raymond Chandler
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
– Raymond Chandler
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
– Raymond Chandler
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
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
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
– Raymond Chandler
The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
– Raymond Chandler
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
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
The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.
– Raymond Chandler
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
The streets were dark with something more than night.
– Raymond Chandler
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
– Raymond Chandler
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
– Raymond Chandler
'Common sense is the guy that tells you that you ought to have your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in the grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.
– Raymond Chandler
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
– Raymond Chandler
Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency.
– Raymond Chandler
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
– Raymond Chandler