Raymond Chandler Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• 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

  Mean, Hands, People

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Simple Art of Murder”, p.19, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Sleep, Caring, Oil And Water

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Big Sleep: A Novel”, p.230, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

  9 Copy quote

• The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased
  the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

  Raymond Chandler

  Art, Growth, Population

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Simple Art of Murder”, p.5, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

  9 Copy quote

• Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than you'll do the truth good. Or until I'm hauled before somebody that can make me talk.

  Raymond Chandler

  Fall, Guy, Soul

  Raymond Chandler (2014). “The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words”, p.123, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

• If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.

  Raymond Chandler

  Alive, Gentle, Hard

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “Playback: A Novel”, p.200, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

  6 Copy quote

• Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

  Raymond Chandler

  Agency, Chess, Waste

  Of chess. Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  Cute, Boys, Murder Victims

  Raymond Chandler (1983). “The Chandler Collection: Pearls are a nuisance ; Smart-aleck kill ; Killer in the rain”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Forests, Nasty

  Raymond Chandler (2011). “The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely”, p.13, Modern Library

  6 Copy quote

• The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

  Raymond Chandler

  Strong, Coffee, Smell

  Raymond Chandler (2011). “The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely”, p.369, Modern Library

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Fashion, Cat, Tree

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

  17 Copy quote

• I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops . . . I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.

  Raymond Chandler

  Smart, Thinking, Hatred

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Civilization, America

  53 Copy quote

• The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn't take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should do the best he can without straining at it. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won't get it. And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back.

  Raymond Chandler

  Wise, Goodbye, Honesty

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Wall, Nice

  "The Long Goodbye". Book by Raymond Chandler, 1953.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Men, Years

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.139, Univ of California Press

  17 Copy quote

• A really good detective never gets married.

  Raymond Chandler

  Police, Detectives, Married

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

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Chandler

  Integrity, Men, Hollywood

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.120, Univ of California Press

  76 Copy quote

• Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

  Raymond Chandler

  Gun, Men, Thinking

  "The Simple Art of Murder". Book by Raymond Chandler (Introduction), 1950.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Men, Fiction

  Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney, Frank MacShane (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.160, Grove Press

  12 Copy quote

• When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)

  Raymond Chandler

  Doors, Hands, Pie

  Raymond Chandler (1995). “Stories and Early Novels”

  8 Copy quote

• It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

  Raymond Chandler

  This Generation, Generations, Patterns

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.53, Univ of California Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Trouble, Chairs, Regan

  Raymond Chandler (2011). “The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely”, p.24, Modern Library

  7 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Chandler

  Foam, Tonight, Calling

  Raymond Chandler (2011). “The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely”, p.464, Modern Library

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Glasses, Hollywood

  60 Copy quote

• The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Reading, Design

  10 Copy quote

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