Best 233 quotes of Raymond Chandler on MyQuotes

Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)

A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

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.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

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.

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 reading for pleasure is entertainment.

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice  and nothing else.

A really good detective never gets married.

[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.

As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.

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.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

California, the department store state.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. 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 a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.

Could she *be* anymore out of my league?

Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it

Dames lie about anything - just for practice.

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.

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

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.

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

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.

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.

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.

I certainly admire people who do things.

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

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

I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.

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.

If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.

If you believe in an idea, you don't own you, it owns you.

If you liked a book, don't meet the author

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.