Raymond Chandler Quotes

American novelist and screenwriter (1888–1959)

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Raymond Thornton Chandler (23 July 1888 – 26 March 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter who specialized in the crime fiction genre.

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Birth Name: Raymond Thornton Chandler

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Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.

If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive.
If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.

To hell with the rich, they make me sick.

I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.

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.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

Farewell, My Lovely · August 1, 1992 Verified in 2 sources · 1 more available Sign up to see the complete provenance

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Don't be a hero, young man. There's no percentage in it.

The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don't find.

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.

The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats.

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

I’m a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn’t gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.

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