Raymond Chandler > Quotes

“You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don't have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“California, the department store state.”
― Raymond Chandler

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”
― Raymond Chandler

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“The challenge is to write about real things magically.”
― Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters

“She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might,if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than you'll do the truth good. Or until I'm hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“Mr Cobb was my escort. Such a nice escort, Mr Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten - when Larry Cobb was sober.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”
― Raymond Chandler

“To hell with the rich, they make me sick.”
― Raymond Chandler

“As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”
― Raymond Chandler

“It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch-box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture-mover in a sweaty undershirt.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“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, The High Window

“There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science and the second is art.”
― Raymond Chandler

“It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid”
― raymond chandler

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

“She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.”
― Raymond Chandler

“One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is ever happy anywhere.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything.”
― Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking

“A really good detective never gets married.”
― Raymond Chandler

“A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye