Raymond Chandler quotes - page 4

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)
Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love. View quote
Raymond Chandler
She had eyes like strange sins. View quote
Raymond Chandler
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. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron. View quote
Raymond Chandler
I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split. View quote
Raymond Chandler
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone. View quote
Raymond Chandler
California, the department store state. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The challenge is to write about real things magically. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point. (Raymond Chandler)
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. View quote
Raymond Chandler
As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books. View quote
Raymond Chandler
A good title is the title of a successful book. View quote
Raymond Chandler
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. View quote
Raymond Chandler
(Henry Clarendon IV:) "Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God's days are very, very long?" View quote
Raymond Chandler
We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. View quote
Raymond Chandler
The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to. (Raymond Chandler)
You know what Canino will do---beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. View quote
Raymond Chandler
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. View quote
Raymond Chandler
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones. View quote
Raymond Chandler