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
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
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 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
A really good detective never gets married.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Control, Police
Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Business
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: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
The more you reason the less you create.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reason
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: Manners
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
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Science, Scientists
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
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: Critics, Criticism
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Talent, Fresh
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
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
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
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
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Appearance
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
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
A good title is the title of a successful book.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Books, Reading
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
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
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
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
Topics: Hollywood
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
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
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: Autobiography, Legacy
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: Animals, Cats
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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