Raymond Chandler (1888–1959,) fully Raymond Thornton Chandler, was an American author of detective fiction. He is remembered as the creator of the private detective Philip Marlowe, who appeared in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939.)
Born in Chicago, Chandler was brought up in England from seven and educated at Dulwich College and in France and Germany. He worked as a freelance writer in London before going to California in 1912. He also served in the Canadian army in France and in the RAF during World War I.
After a variety of jobs, Chandler began to write during the Depression. His short stories and novelettes appeared in the magazine Black Mask and for the detective-story pulp magazines. He continued this writing experience into full-length ‘private eye’ novels: The Big Sleep (1939,) Farewell, My Lovely (1940,) The High Window (1942,) and The Lady in the Lake (1943,) all of which were successfully filmed.
Chandler went to Hollywood in 1943 to work on film scripts. He did much to establish the protocols of his genre, especially with his sardonic but honest anti-hero, Philip Marlowe, who also emerged in such later works as The Little Sister (1949,) The Long Goodbye (1953,) and Playback (1958.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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
Topics: Authors & Writing
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. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Television
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
Topics: Hollywood
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid… He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Heroes, Heroism
The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called “significant literature” will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Public
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Smiles, Smile
It’s fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Education, America
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism. All this stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating against the bars, running spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs—all that is for the big house. A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world. Life in jail is in suspension.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Prison
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
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?. In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill?. 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.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Dying, Death
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Law, Lawyers
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
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Fresh, Talent
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
Topics: Business
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
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
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.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Advertising
A really good detective never gets married.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Police, Control
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
Topics: Books, Publishers, Publishing
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
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
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
Topics: Murder
The more you reason the less you create.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reason
Its idea of “production value” is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Appearance
Woe, woe, woe… in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Death, Dying
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
Topics: Television
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Books, Literature
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
Topics: Common Sense
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Wealth
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
Topics: Animals, Cats
The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can’t be sure. When he can no longer throw his high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He just doesn’t walk off the mound and weep.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Resolve, Perseverance, Endurance
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
Topics: Hollywood
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Poetry, Poets
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Books, Reading
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
Topics: America
I’ve found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Language
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
Topics: Business
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