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
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
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
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Talent, Fresh
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
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Smile, Smiles
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Law, Lawyers
A really good detective never gets married.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Police, Control
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Drinking
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: Art, Artists, Arts
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
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
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 law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Lawyers, Justice, Law
I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Cats, Animals
A good title is the title of a successful book.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reading, Books
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
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
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
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside of an advertising agency.
—Raymond Chandler
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: Publishing, Publishers, Books
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Wealth
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
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
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
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
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
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
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
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Ellery Queen American Crime Fiction Authors
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Dashiell Hammett American Crime Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Truman Capote American Novelist
- George R. R. Martin American Writer
- John Irving American Novelist
- William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
- William Goldman Hollywood Screenwriter
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