Raymond Chandler Quotes
Most popular Raymond Chandler Quotes
The more you reason, the less you create.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
If you believe in an ideal, you don't own you, it owns you.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.
She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.
The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you just take the girl's clothes off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
I regard psychiatry as fifty per cent bunk, thirty per cent fraud, ten per cent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read it.
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.
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.
