Chandler Raymond Quotes & Sayings

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people. — Raymond Chandler

He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman. — Raymond Chandler

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. — Raymond Chandler

Anybody home, son?" "You ought to know." "How would I know?" "Go - yourself." "That's how people get false teeth." He showed me his in a tight grin. — Raymond Chandler

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split. — Raymond Chandler

You were lucky about that gun. All the people we know have been playing with it, wiping prints off and putting them on. I even put a set on myself just to be fashionable. — 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

Dames lie about anything - just for practice. — Raymond Chandler

The same broken promise of a life of ease. I — Raymond Chandler

I'm not a young man. I'm old, tired and full of no coffee. — Raymond Chandler

A really good detective never gets married. — Raymond Chandler

If there's another writer, like Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler, and all they're writing are mysteries, they won't be accepted," he said. "And that's problematic. A lot of so-called literary novels are just not very good. They're not well-written, they're not well-thought-out. They have pyrotechnics of intelligence.
"On the other hand, some of the best writers and speculative ideas are in science-fiction. The science-fiction genre is completely, completely segregated. And these people are writing good stuff. They're writing about where you're going, which means they're talking about where you are. — Walter Mosley

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

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

There was a time when actors went in at the back door. Most of them still should. — Raymond Chandler

It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street. — 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

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

Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act — 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

Could she *be* anymore out of my league? — Raymond Chandler

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life. — Raymond Chandler

Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. 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 put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes — Raymond Chandler

She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts. — Raymond Chandler

Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his teeth in. — Raymond Chandler

A good title is the title of a successful book. — Raymond Chandler

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing. — Megan Abbott

A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man, — Lawrence Block

She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term I'll eat my spare tyre, rim and all. — 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

He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job."

She brightened up very suddenly. "Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married."

"I guess he forgot," I said, "or he would have gone somewhere else. — 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

I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops ... I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up. — 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

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun. — Raymond Chandler

I said: "Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish. — Raymond Chandler

I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don't read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike ... I threw the paper into the corner and turned on the TV set. After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good. — Raymond Chandler

No visible scars. Hair dark brown, some gray. Eyes brown. Height six feet, one half inch. Weight about one ninety. Name Philip Marlowe. Occupation private detective. — Raymond Chandler

She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon's tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. — Raymond Chandler

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. — 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. — Raymond Chandler

I needed a drink and was in a hurry to get one. I — Raymond Chandler

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. — Raymond Chandler

I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really high-class seduction. — Raymond Chandler

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying. — Raymond Chandler

Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard. — 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

The butler went away among the abominable plants. The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings. — 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

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

But sometimes when you are getting nowhere, you have to give the wasps' nest a wallop — Benjamin Black

No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront. — Raymond Chandler

Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character. — Raymond Chandler

The pursuit of knowledge, brother, is the askin' of many questions. — 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

Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right. — Raymond Chandler

The charged atmosphere made every little thing stand out as a performance, a movement distinct and vastly important. It was one of those hypersensitive moments when all your automatic movements, however long established, however habitual, become separate acts of will. You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all. — Raymond Chandler

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar - that's wonderful. — Raymond Chandler

Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him a domed brown forehead that might at careless glance seemed a dwelling place for brains. — Raymond Chandler

I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty. — Raymond Chandler

It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts ... nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo. — Raymond Chandler

The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love. — Raymond Chandler

A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet. — Raymond Chandler

The next hour was three hours long — Raymond Chandler

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest ... a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. — Raymond Chandler

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. — Raymond Chandler

The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut. — Raymond Chandler

I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God. — Sara Paretsky

She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound. — Raymond Chandler

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction. — Raymond Chandler

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. — 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

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. — Raymond Chandler

I'm killing time and it's dying hard. — Raymond Chandler

then Malloy took the gun away from whoever did it. — 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

I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase.
It seemed like a lot of copper. — 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

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush. — Raymond Chandler

The little one-story house was as neat as a fresh pinafore. The front lawn was cut lovingly and very green. The smooth composition driveway was free of grease spots from standing cars, and the hedge that bordered it looked as though the barber came every day.
The white door had a knocker with a tiger's head, a go-to-hell window and a dingus that let someone inside talk to someone outside without even opening the little window.
I'd have given a mortgage on my left leg to live in a house like that. I didn't think I ever would.
(The Pencil) — Raymond Chandler

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation. — Raymond Chandler

If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."
"Caterpillar blood," I said. — 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

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth. — Raymond Chandler

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say. — Raymond Chandler

Her eyes ate me. — Raymond Chandler

One would think a writer would be happy here
if a writer is every happy anywhere. — Raymond Chandler

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order. — Raymond Chandler

No trial, no sensational headlines, no mud-slinging just to sell newspapers without the slightest regard for truth or fair play or for the feelings of innocent people. — 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 moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication. — Raymond Chandler

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

To say goodbye is to die a little. — Raymond Chandler

On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young. — Raymond Chandler

In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. — Raymond Chandler

I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn't think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall. — Raymond Chandler

Got any good ideas, soldier?" "Lots of them. Somebody gunned Geiger. Somebody got gunned by Geiger, who ran away. Or it was two other fellows. Or Geiger was running a cult and made blood sacrifices in front of that totem pole. Or he had chicken for dinner and liked to kill his chickens in the front parlor. — Raymond Chandler

I bet she snaps a mean garter. — Raymond Chandler