Raymond Chandler Quotes - Page 3

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

She had eyes like strange sins.

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

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.

You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement

Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.

Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be." Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

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