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Raymond Chandler Quotes
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Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime . All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered to be a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

At least three of Chandler's novels have been regarded as masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely , The Little Sister , and The Long Goodbye . The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler's reputation has grown in recent years. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. July 1888 – 26. March 1959   •   Other names Raymont Chandler, Ρέημοντ Τσάντλερ, ریموند چندلر
Raymond Chandler photo
Raymond Chandler: 124   quotes 14   likes

Raymond Chandler Quotes

“"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

Guy , Hell , Time , Personality

“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)

Feeling , Mountain , Beer , Study

“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

Life , Flowers , Fight

“I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1954)

Way

“Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.”

Raymond Chandler

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

Love , Feeling , Problem , Time

“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.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

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.
Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

Peace , War , Past , Children

“By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”

Raymond Chandler

In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. [Hiney, Tom, Frank MacShane, 2000, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 77, ISBN 0871137860]

Way , Perfection , God , Reading