Raymond Chandler: Trending quotes

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Raymond Chandler: 248 quotes14 likes

“Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

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

“The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.”

Raymond Chandler

"Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story", published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler(1976)

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

Raymond Chandler

As quoted in Hollywood Remembered : An Oral History of Its Golden Age (2002) by Paul Zollo

“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.”

Raymond Chandler

"A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

“[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.”

Raymond Chandler

"A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. 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 men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

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

“She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 2

“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

Raymond Chandler

letter, 22 April 1949, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

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

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 2

“The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats.”

Raymond Chandler

"'I'll Be Waiting' (short story), published in the Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 1939

“Okay, thees Hench no good, but poor guy, drunk, no job. Pay no rent, but I got lotsa money. So I say, Look, Hench, you make the confess. You sick man. Two three weeks sick. You go into court. I have a lawyer for you. You say to hell with the confess. I was drunk. The damn coppers are stuck. The judge he turn you loose and you come back to me and I take care of you. Okay? So Hench say okay, make the confess. That's all.'
I said: 'And after two or three weeks the bad brother is a long way from here and the trail is cold and the cops will likely just write the Phillips killing off as unsolved. Is that it?”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

'Si.' He smiled again. A brilliant warm smile, like the kiss of death.
Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 24

“On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), Chapter 32, Phillip Marlowe

“He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 2

“You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. “Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

Source: The Long Goodbye (1954), chapter 8

“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.”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 17

“"Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be."”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter one

“He used to wear a little blond moustache but Mother made him cut it off. She said -'
'Don't tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”

Raymond Chandler book The Little Sister

Source: The Little Sister (1949), chapter 2

““Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 24

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

Raymond Chandler

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

“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 2