Raymond Chandler: Likeness

Raymond Chandler was Novelist, screenwriter. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Raymond Chandler: 248 quotes14 likes

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

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 2

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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]