Raymond Chandler > Quotes

“That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.”
― Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking

“Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?"
"It takes about three years."
"Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“The most durable thing in writing is
style. It is a projection of personality and you have
to have a personality before you can project it. It
is the product of emotion and perception.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Tall, aren't you?
I didn't mean to be.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“I certainly admire people who do things.”
― Raymond Chandler

“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.”
― Raymond Chandler

“And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“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."

(A Qualified Farewell)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler; and English Summer: A Gothic Romance

“She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.”
― Raymond Chandler

“We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“It's a swell theory," I said. "Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.

I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“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

“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

“On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn't think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me—and I didn't think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep