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
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Smile, Smiles
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
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: Criticism, Critics
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
Topics: Style
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
A really good detective never gets married.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Control, Police
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
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: Arts, Artists, Art
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 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
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
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
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Law, Lawyers
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Appearance
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
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
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
Topics: Hollywood
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
The tragedy of life is not that the beautiful things die young; it is that they grow old and mean.
—Raymond Chandler
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
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: Endurance, Resolve, Perseverance
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside of an advertising agency.
—Raymond Chandler
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: America, Education
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. – Chandler, Raymond
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Storytelling
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
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: Alcohol, Alcoholism
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
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
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