Raymond Chandler Quotes

All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing.

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

Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us — ” “This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.” “He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might,if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

"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."

Authenticity is boring, credibility is important

"If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."

"Caterpillar blood," I said.

She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man's tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread.

To hell with the rich, they make me sick.

You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid....He must be the best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world." from Raymond Chandler's, "The Simple Act of Murder."

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.

I'm not a young man. I'm old, tired and full of no coffee.

He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips

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.