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
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
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
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
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: Literature, Books
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Smiles, Smile
A good title is the title of a successful book.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reading, Books
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 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
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
It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Language
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
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
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
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
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 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, Law, Justice
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
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 more you reason the less you create.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reason
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Poets, Poetry
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 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 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 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
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 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
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside of an advertising agency.
—Raymond Chandler
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
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
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
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