Raymond Chandler Quotes

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

Her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution. ~ Raymond Chandler

A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound - after the sound of a gun. (Guns at Cyrano's) ~ Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice. ~ Steve Toltz

She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones. ~ Raymond Chandler

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. ~ Raymond Chandler

You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money. ~ Raymond Chandler

I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning. ~ Raymond Chandler

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. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. ~ Raymond Chandler

You have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes. ~ Raymond Chandler

I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them. ~ Raymond Chandler

I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely. ~ Raymond Chandler

She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting. I ~ Raymond Chandler

He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes. ~ Raymond Chandler

Take it easy, Doc. Around here we only hit our wives in private. ~ Raymond Chandler

Her voice was as dead as the summer before last. (Nevada Gas) ~ Raymond Chandler

It's like that, isn't it? Just as Raymond Chandler says, 'The first kiss is dynamite, the second is routine and then you take her clothes off,' It had been like that for Alan in his previous affairs, even the extended one he had had with Sybil while Naomi was pregnant. Sure, Alan went on enjoying sex with Sybil, but at a fundamental level his lust for her had died the very first time he felt the shock of her pubic bone against his, and knew that they were now truly welded into one another. Alan was a one-thrust man. Not that he'd ever been exactly promiscuous. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had been. Rather, his sentiment self-absorption had managed to gild each of these terminal thrusts with enough self-regarding burnish for him to sustain the 'relationships' that legitimised them for months; and in at least two instances, for years. ~ Will Self

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

The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous. ~ Raymond Chandler

Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you. ~ Raymond Chandler

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed. ~ Raymond Chandler

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.
A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way. ~ Raymond Chandler

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many. ~ Avi

It could have been a beautiful friendship," Beifus said with a sigh. "Except for the ice pick, of course. ~ Raymond Chandler

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little. ~ Raymond Chandler

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin. ~ Raymond Chandler

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about? ~ Raymond Chandler

Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy. "Ever kill a man, Marlowe?" "Yes." "Nasty feeling, isn't it?" "Some people like it." His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they looked vague. "How could they? ~ Raymond Chandler

Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake. ~ Raymond Chandler

Hammett was the ace performer ... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. ~ Raymond Chandler

Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable. ~ Raymond Chandler

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it. ~ Raymond Chandler

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth. ~ Raymond Chandler

The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to. ~ Raymond Chandler

The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.
I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it. ~ Raymond Chandler

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country. ~ Raymond Chandler

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

Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on the circulation and you know what circulation depends on. ~ Raymond Chandler

On a dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis. ~ Raymond Chandler

The customer was middle-aged, handsomely dressed, and drunk. He wanted to talk and he couldn't have stopped even if he hadn't really wanted to talk. He was polite and friendly and when I heard him he didn't seem to slur his words much, but you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world. I ~ Raymond Chandler

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. ~ Raymond Chandler

He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job."

She brightened up very suddenly. "Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married."

"I guess he forgot," I said, "or he would have gone somewhere else. ~ Raymond Chandler

Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house. ~ Raymond Chandler

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say. ~ Raymond Chandler

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself. ~ Raymond Chandler

A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now. ~ Raymond Chandler

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun. ~ Raymond Chandler

To hell with the rich, they make me sick. ~ Raymond Chandler

A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. ~ Raymond Chandler

I lit a Camel, blew smoke through my nose and looked at a piece of black shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full, smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Marriott saw me staring at it. "An interesting bit," he said negligently. "I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial's Spirit of Dawn." "I thought it was Klopstein's Two Warts on a Fanny," I said. Mr. Lindsay Marriott's face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort. ~ Raymond Chandler

The kid poured him another straight rye and I think he doctored it with water down behind the bar because when he came up with it he looked as guilty as if he'd kicked his grandmother. ~ Raymond Chandler

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush. ~ Raymond Chandler

He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor. ~ Raymond Chandler

She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon's tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. ~ Raymond Chandler

If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."
"Caterpillar blood," I said. ~ Raymond Chandler

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. ~ Raymond Chandler

He looked around and yawned. "I haven't been sleeping well. It's nice in here. But after a while the lushes will fill the place up and talk loud and laugh and the goddam women will start waving their hands and screwing up their faces and tinkling their goddam bracelets and making up with the packaged charm which will later on in the evening have a slight but unmistakable odour of sweat."
"Take it easy," I said. "So they're human, they sweat, they get dirty, they have to go to the bathroom. What did you expect – golden butterflies hovering in a rosy mist? ~ Raymond Chandler

One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it. ~ Raymond Chandler

That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep. ~ Raymond Chandler

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. ~ Raymond Chandler

We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don't like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. ~ Raymond Chandler

He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman. ~ Raymond Chandler

I'm killing time and it's dying hard. ~ Raymond Chandler

I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really high-class seduction. ~ Raymond Chandler

Javonen smiled - very slightly. Call it a down payment on a smile. ~ Raymond Chandler

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness. ~ Raymond Chandler

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. ~ Raymond Chandler

I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more. ~ Raymond Chandler

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic. ~ Raymond Chandler

So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer."
"Me? How?"
"The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read."
"Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them."
She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said. "I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at."
"That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops."
"Oh, nuts. ~ 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

Her hand was small and had shape, not the usual bony garden tool you see on women nowadays. ~ Raymond Chandler

The living room was still dark, because of the heavy growth of the shrubbery the owner had allowed to mask the windows. I put a lamp on and mooched a cigarette. I lit it. I stared down at him. I rumpled my hair which was already rumpled. I put the old tired grin on my face. ~ Raymond Chandler

You were lucky about that gun. All the people we know have been playing with it, wiping prints off and putting them on. I even put a set on myself just to be fashionable. ~ Raymond Chandler

The pursuit of knowledge, brother, is the askin' of many questions. ~ Raymond Chandler

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others. ~ Raymond Chandler

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked. ~ Raymond Chandler

Ohls showed the motor-cycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night's hard rain hadn't even dented. ~ Raymond Chandler

I certainly admire people who do things. ~ Raymond Chandler

She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her. ~ Raymond Chandler

Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. ~ Raymond Chandler

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
(A Qualified Farewell) ~ Raymond Chandler

She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded. ~ Raymond Chandler

The fear of today," he said, "always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It's a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn't defeat reason, there would be very little drama. ~ Raymond Chandler

An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. Light ~ Raymond Chandler

She's a nice girl. Not my type." "You don't like them nice?" He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. "I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin." "They take you to the cleaners," Randall said indifferently. ~ Raymond Chandler

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. ~ Raymond Chandler

There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop. ~ Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way. ~ Lou Reed

Go ahead and faint," I said. "I'll catch you on the first bounce. ~ Raymond Chandler

Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but the smell of the ocean and the suddenly clear line of the shore and the creaming fall of the waves into the pebbled spume. I walked almost alone now. The noises died behind me, the hot dishonest light became a fumbling glare. Then the lightless finger of a black pier jutted seaward into the dark. This would be the one. I turned to go out on it. Red ~ Raymond Chandler

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers. ~ Raymond Chandler

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. ~ Raymond Chandler

Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay bank at whose edge a few unbeatable wild flowers clawed and hung on like naughty children who won't go to bed. ~ Raymond Chandler

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. ~ Raymond Chandler

Woe, woe, woe ... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already. ~ Raymond Chandler

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy. ~ Raymond Chandler

[Raymond Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered. ~ The New Yorker

Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else. ~ Raymond Chandler

I'm rich. Who the hell wants to be happy? ~ Raymond Chandler