Raymond Chandler Quotes - Page 7

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

If you liked a book, don't meet the author

You can't have everything, even in California

The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

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, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Could she *be* anymore out of my league?

Dames lie about anything - just for practice.

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.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

All reading for pleasure is entertainment.

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

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.

I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

May I wish for you the knowledge...that marriages do not take place, they are made by hand; that there is always an element of discipline involved; that however perfect the honeymoon, the time will come, however brief it is, when you wish she would fall downstairs and break a leg. This goes for her too. But the mood will pass, if you give it time.

I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful.

It is not a fragrant world.

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.