Best 233 quotes of Raymond Chandler on MyQuotes

Raymond Chandler

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    A good title is the title of a successful book.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    All reading for pleasure is entertainment.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    A really good detective never gets married.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    [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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    California, the department store state.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    Could she *be* anymore out of my league?

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    Dames lie about anything - just for practice.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    I certainly admire people who do things.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

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

  • By Anonym
    Raymond Chandler

    I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.