Raymond Chandler Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Raymond Chandler.
Famous Quotes By 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. — Raymond Chandler
I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability. — Raymond Chandler
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.
(A Qualified Farewell) — 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. — Raymond Chandler
I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can't tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe. — Raymond Chandler
I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one — Raymond Chandler
She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her. — Raymond Chandler
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. — 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
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
The fear of today," he said, "always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It's a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn't defeat reason, there would be very little drama. — Raymond Chandler
So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy. — Raymond Chandler
There was a time when actors went in at the back door. Most of them still should. — Raymond Chandler
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
Her hair by daylight was pure auburn and on it she wore a hat with a crown the size of a whiskey glass and a brim you could have wrapped the week's laundry in. She wore it at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, so that the edge of the brim just missed her shoulder. In spite of that it looked smart. Perhaps because of that. She — Raymond Chandler
Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment. - on Hollywood — Raymond Chandler
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
Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book. — Raymond Chandler
I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her. — Raymond Chandler
There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish. — Raymond Chandler
She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting. I — Raymond Chandler
There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks ... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them ... Decent people lost their jobs ... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system. — Raymond Chandler
The colour of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. — 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
This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time- putting thumb marks on the new jackets. Nobody paid any attention to them. — Raymond Chandler
Carli's was a small club at the end of a passage between a sporting-goods store and a circulating library. There was a grilled door and a man behind it who had given up trying to look as if it mattered who came in. (Smart-Aleck Kill) — Raymond Chandler
I suppose you do this to all the clients, she said softly. — Raymond Chandler
One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it. — 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
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. — Raymond Chandler
He breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket. — Raymond Chandler
It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. — 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
I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling. — Raymond Chandler
The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading. — Raymond Chandler
There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder. — Raymond Chandler
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
The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket — Raymond Chandler
The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. — Raymond Chandler
I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission." "I get it," I said. "I'm stupid. It sank in after a while. — Raymond Chandler
Oh sure, I'm her husband. That's what the record says. I'm the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse. — 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. — Raymond Chandler
Hammett was the ace performer ... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. — Raymond Chandler
The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to. — Raymond Chandler
You're not human tonight, Marlowe. — Raymond Chandler
Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be. — Raymond Chandler
The living room was still dark, because of the heavy growth of the shrubbery the owner had allowed to mask the windows. I put a lamp on and mooched a cigarette. I lit it. I stared down at him. I rumpled my hair which was already rumpled. I put the old tired grin on my face. — Raymond Chandler
A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now. — Raymond Chandler
Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her. — Raymond Chandler
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
Lucille has a dull life, Mr. Marlowe. She's stuck here with me and a PBX. And an itty-bitty diamond ring - so small I was ashamed to give it to her. But what can a man do? If he loves a girl, he'd like it to show on her finger."
Lucille held her left hand up and moved it around to get a flash from the little stone. "I hate it," she said. "I hate it like I hate the sunshine and the summer and the bright stars and the full moon. That's how I hate it".
I picked up the key and my suitcase and left them. A little more of that and I'd be falling in love with myself. I might even give myself a small unpretentious diamond ring. — Raymond Chandler
The customer was middle-aged, handsomely dressed, and drunk. He wanted to talk and he couldn't have stopped even if he hadn't really wanted to talk. He was polite and friendly and when I heard him he didn't seem to slur his words much, but you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world. I — Raymond Chandler
There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop. — Raymond Chandler
You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don't have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security. — Raymond Chandler
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cookies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them. (from) The High Window — Raymond Chandler
Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard. — Raymond Chandler
The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed. (I'll be waiting) — Raymond Chandler
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck. — Raymond Chandler
I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely. — Raymond Chandler
If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive. — Raymond Chandler
Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake. — Raymond Chandler
A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. — Raymond Chandler
I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to light. But when he did, I didn't even see him at first. The buzzing stopped and there he was. And then the phone rang. — Raymond Chandler
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee - yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men. It — Raymond Chandler
He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read. — Raymond Chandler
The pursuit of knowledge, brother, is the askin' of many questions. — Raymond Chandler
That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you. — Raymond Chandler
A doorman opened the door for me and I went in. The lobby was not quite as big as the Yankee Stadium. It was floored with a pale blue carpet with sponge rubber underneath. It was so soft it made me want to lie down and roll. — Raymond Chandler
Marlowe's the name. The guy you've been trying to follow around for a couple of days."
"I ain't following anybody, doc."
"This jalopy is. Maybe you can't control it. Have it your own way. I'm now going to eat breakfast in the coffee shop across the street: orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, honey, three or four cups of coffee, and a toothpick. I am then going up to my office, which is on the seventh floor of the building right opposite you. If you have anything that's worrying you beyond endurance, drop up and chew it over. I'll only be oiling my machine gun. — Raymond Chandler
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
The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: "Philip Marlowe ... Investigations." It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with same legend which is not locked. Come on in
there's nobody here but me an a big bluebottle fly. But not if you're from Manhattan, Kansas. — Raymond Chandler
No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront. — Raymond Chandler
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. — Raymond Chandler
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me. — Raymond Chandler
Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram. — Raymond Chandler
The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average
or only slightly above average
detective story does ... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way. — Raymond Chandler
You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off. — Raymond Chandler
The car slid along Los Angeles to Fifth, east to San Pedro, south again for block after block, quiet blocks and loud blocks, blocks where silent men sat on shaky front porches and blocks where noisy young toughs of both colors snarled and wise-cracked at one another in front of cheap restaurants and drug-stores and beer parlors full of slot machines. (Pickup on Noon Street) — Raymond Chandler
The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said, partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down — Raymond Chandler
Seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. — 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 didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories. — Raymond Chandler
Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines. — 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
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. — Raymond Chandler
Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. — 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
It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay. — Raymond Chandler
I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads. — Raymond Chandler
I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow. — Raymond Chandler
Go on home and knit socks, darling, — Raymond Chandler
She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man's tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread. — Raymond Chandler
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong. — Raymond Chandler
Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper. — Raymond Chandler
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon. — Raymond Chandler
To hell with the rich, they make me sick. — Raymond Chandler