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Top Raymond Chandler Quotes

Browse top 186 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Raymond Chandler.

Favorite Raymond Chandler Quotes

1. "I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine." ~ Raymond Chandler
2. "Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay bank at whose edge a few unbeatable wild flowers clawed and hung on like naughty children who won't go to bed." ~ Raymond Chandler
3. "Oh sure, I'm her husband. That's what the record says. I'm the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse." ~ Raymond Chandler
4. "- ¿Cómo puedes ser tan duro y tan tierno a la vez?- Si no fuera duro no podría estar vivo, si no fuera tierno no merecería estarlo." ~ Raymond Chandler
5. "A occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me." ~ Raymond Chandler
6. "Her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution." ~ Raymond Chandler
7. "A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back." ~ Raymond Chandler
8. "I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them." ~ Raymond Chandler
9. "Los editores y otros deberían dejar de preocuparse por la pérdida de clientela que puede causarles la televisión. El tipo que puede soportar un trío de anuncios de desodorantes para mirar a Flashgun Casey y tragarse los elogios a cervezas o a planes usuarios de crédito para poder ver a un par de boxeadores de cuarta frotándose las narices contra las cuerdas no es alguien que vaya a perder tiempo leyendo libros." ~ Raymond Chandler
10. "He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read." ~ Raymond Chandler
11. "Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it." ~ Raymond Chandler
12. "It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it." ~ Raymond Chandler
13. "Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon." ~ Raymond Chandler
14. "I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything." ~ Raymond Chandler
15. "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." ~ Raymond Chandler
16. "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
17. "It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars." ~ Raymond Chandler
18. "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. So we have to work with what we get." ~ Raymond Chandler
19. "Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch-box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture-mover in a sweaty undershirt." ~ Raymond Chandler
20. "He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway." ~ Raymond Chandler
21. "I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her." ~ Raymond Chandler
22. "I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads." ~ Raymond Chandler
23. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail." ~ Raymond Chandler
24. "Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram." ~ Raymond Chandler
25. "You are not very tall are you?""I try to be".Exchange between Martha Vickers and Bogie in "The Big Sleep"." ~ Raymond Chandler
26. "Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cookies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them. (from) "The High Window" ~ Raymond Chandler
27. "I'm killing time and it's dying hard." ~ Raymond Chandler
28. "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
29. "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
30. "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." ~ Raymond Chandler
31. "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts." ~ Raymond Chandler
32. "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
33. "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." ~ Raymond Chandler
34. "The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back." ~ Raymond Chandler
35. "A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled." ~ Raymond Chandler
36. "An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence." ~ Raymond Chandler
37. "The more you reason the less you create." ~ Raymond Chandler
38. "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
39. "The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love." ~ Raymond Chandler
40. "You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same." ~ Raymond Chandler
41. "We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk."—" ~ Raymond Chandler
42. "Pero siempre me gustan los libros equivocados. Y las películas equivocadas. Y la gente equivocada." ~ Raymond Chandler
43. "Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way." ~ Raymond Chandler
44. "I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow." ~ Raymond Chandler
45. "She was staring after me with an expression she probably would have said was thoughtful." ~ Raymond Chandler
46. "I said: "Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish." ~ Raymond Chandler
47. "The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law."(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)" ~ Raymond Chandler
48. "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."(Letter, April 19, 1951)" ~ Raymond Chandler
49. "Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella." ~ Raymond Chandler
50. "He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking." ~ Raymond Chandler
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Today's Quote

Apparently, I have a totally different sense of humour."
Author: Andrew Eldritch

What Did Raymond Chandler Talk About?

Thin
Wit
She
Here
Lit
Ear
Hey
Use
Per
Thou
Ten
Air
Hen
Low
Ought
King
Con
Sin
Though
Able
End
Old
Tan
Owe
Hair
Eye
Era
Star
Mean
Body
Win
Act
House
Room
Hand
Looked
Talk
Son
Ape
Seem
Pen
Eyes
Side
Ways
Bee
Yes
Call
Self
Round
Care

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