Raymond Chandler Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

  Raymond Chandler

  Morning, Writing, Typewriters

• A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Stories, Storytelling

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.75, Univ of California Press

• 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

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Challenges, Movement

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.119, Univ of California Press

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

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Gun, Men

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

• 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

  Writing, Mean, Pushing

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.216, Univ of California Press

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

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Years, Want

• 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

  Struggle, Writing, Suspense

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.70, Univ of California Press

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

  Raymond Chandler

  Passion, Writing, Technique

• 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

  Art, Struggle, Writing

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.82, Univ of California Press

• 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

  Writing, Cutting, Thinking

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.49, Univ of California Press

• Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.

  Raymond Chandler

  Eye, Writing, Loss

  Raymond Chandler (1987). “Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler”, Delta

• 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

  Art, Writing, Desire

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “Trouble Is My Business: A Novel”, p.5, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

• 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

  Writing, Style, Investment

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.75, Univ of California Press

• The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

  Raymond Chandler

  Time, Writing, People

  "Writing a new Philip Marlowe: a question of dialogue, attitude and style" by John Banville, www.theguardian.com. January 30, 2015.

• 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.

  Raymond Chandler

  God, Writing, Eye

  Letter to Edward Weeks, 18 Jan. 1947, in F. MacShane Life of Raymond Chandler (1976) ch. 7

• 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

  New York, Writing, Criticism

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.78, Univ of California Press

• 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

  Writing, Long, Forever

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.158, Univ of California Press

• 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.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Writing, Average

• 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

  Love, Appreciation, Art

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.95, Univ of California Press

• They write them long because they can't write them short.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Writing, Long

• 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

  Writing, Advice, Progress

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.93, Univ of California Press

• 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

  Honesty, Writing, Men

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.93, Univ of California Press

• 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

  Writing, Advice, Like Yourself

  Raymond Chandler (1987). “Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler”, Delta

• 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

  Writing, Order

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.92, Univ of California Press

• The challenge is to write about real things magically.

  Raymond Chandler

  Real, Writing, Challenges

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