Raymond Chandler Quotes

• Dashiell Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Raymond Chandler

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• By his standards anyone who noticed how many walls the room had would be observant.

  Raymond Chandler

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• A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.

  Raymond Chandler

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• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.

  Raymond Chandler

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• A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film-making. It’s not what films are for.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Some people are better off dead—like your wife and my father for instance.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.

  Raymond Chandler

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• California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

  Raymond Chandler

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• It wasn’t exactly carelessness; her knowledge of literate English contained such vast areas of desert that she took it for granted that half of what she wrote would be meaningless to her.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• By the way, do you ever read the Bible ? I suppose not very often, but I had occasion to the other night and believe me it is a lesson in how not to write for the movies. The worst kind of overwriting. Whole chapters that could have been said in one paragraph. And the dialogue!

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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 stay split.

  Raymond Chandler

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• Just don’t get too complicated Eddie. When a guy gets too complicated he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy—his luck runs out.

  Raymond Chandler

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• Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

  Raymond Chandler

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• It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

  Raymond Chandler

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• The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Uncategorized

• There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Truth

• Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.

  Raymond Chandler

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Magic

Raymond Chandler (63)

Birth:	23rd July, 1888
Death:	26th March, 1959
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Screenwriter

About

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression.

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