110+ Raymond Chandler Quotes On Writing, Los Angeles And Mysterious

Raymond Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his hard-boiled detective stories featuring private investigator Philip Marlowe. Chandler wrote the novels The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye, all of which were adapted into films. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Raymond Chandler on writing, los angeles, mysterious.

Top 10 Raymond Chandler Quotes

1. When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
2. Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
3. He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
4. Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
5. It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
6. There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.
7. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
8. Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
9. At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
10. I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.

Raymond Chandler Short Quotes

• To say goodbye is to die a little.
• There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
• A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
• Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
• There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
• She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
• She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
• Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
• When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
• You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.

Raymond Chandler Quotes About Writing

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon. — Raymond Chandler

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

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. — Raymond Chandler

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

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. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic. — Raymond Chandler

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know. — Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler Quotes About Hollywood

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom. — Raymond Chandler

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. — Raymond Chandler

Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. — Raymond Chandler

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them. — Raymond Chandler

Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober. — Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler Quotes About Write

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic. — Raymond Chandler

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all. — Raymond Chandler

They write them long because they can't write them short. — Raymond Chandler

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about? — Raymond Chandler

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself. — Raymond Chandler

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. — Raymond Chandler

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

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

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. — Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler Quotes About Business

I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability. — Raymond Chandler

The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business. — Raymond Chandler

Shake your business up and pour it. I haven't got all day. — Raymond Chandler

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck. — Raymond Chandler

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system. — Raymond Chandler

Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. — Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler Quotes About People

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. — Raymond Chandler

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead. — Raymond Chandler

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. — Raymond Chandler

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had — Raymond Chandler

If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents. — Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler Famous Quotes And Sayings

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism. — Raymond Chandler

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air. — Raymond Chandler

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. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. — Raymond Chandler

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. — Raymond Chandler

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it. — Raymond Chandler

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

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked. — Raymond Chandler

Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool, a clever fool - perhaps - but a fool just the same. — Raymond Chandler

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off. — Raymond Chandler

So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy. — Raymond Chandler

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

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. — Raymond Chandler

Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be. — Raymond Chandler

I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling. — Raymond Chandler

As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style. — Raymond Chandler

A really good detective never gets married. — Raymond Chandler

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars. — Raymond Chandler

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. — Raymond Chandler

If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive. — Raymond Chandler

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. — Raymond Chandler

She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts. — Raymond Chandler

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. — Raymond Chandler

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

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

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. — Raymond Chandler

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 more you reason the less you create. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. — Raymond Chandler

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

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. — Raymond Chandler

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers. — Raymond Chandler

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. — Raymond Chandler

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. — Raymond Chandler

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness. — Raymond Chandler

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success. — Raymond Chandler

James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. — Raymond Chandler

The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love. — Raymond Chandler

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas. — Raymond Chandler

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money. — Raymond Chandler

Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it — Raymond Chandler

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles. — Raymond Chandler

Dames lie about anything - just for practice. — Raymond Chandler

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it. — 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

I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent 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. — Raymond Chandler

The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life. — Raymond Chandler

The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn. — Raymond Chandler

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

It is not a fragrant world. — Raymond Chandler

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy. — Raymond Chandler

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off. — Raymond Chandler

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life. — Raymond Chandler

The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion. — Raymond Chandler

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. — Raymond Chandler

However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money. — Raymond Chandler

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. — Raymond Chandler

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. — Raymond Chandler

I'm killing time and it's dying hard. — Raymond Chandler

California, the department store state. — Raymond Chandler

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights. — Raymond Chandler

Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells 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 gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up. — Raymond Chandler

Life Lessons by Raymond Chandler

1. Raymond Chandler taught us to never give up on our dreams and to always strive for success, no matter the obstacles that may arise.
2. He also showed us the importance of staying true to ourselves and our own individual values, even in the face of adversity.
3. Lastly, Chandler taught us to remain humble and to never take ourselves too seriously, as life is too short to not enjoy it.