Raymond Chandler: Trending quotes

“A good title is the title of a successful book.”

“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.”

“(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?"”

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

Raymond Chandler book Playback

Source: Playback (1958), chapter 17

“We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 20

“She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1954)

“They say money don't stink," he said. "I sometimes wonder.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 34

“The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.”

“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”

"Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

“The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head.”

letter, 19 April 1951, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

“To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips. (…) Just another four-flusher.”

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 2

“You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.”

"Red Wind" (short story, 1938), published in Trouble Is My Business (1939)

Raymond Chandler book Playback

Source: Playback (1958), chapter 14

“There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.”

“Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

“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.”

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 1

“Tsk, tsk," I said, not moving at all. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

“He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in.”

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 14

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 3

“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.”

“You know what Canino will do---beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling.”

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

“The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.”

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), Chapter 28