Raymond Chandler Quotes

A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. 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.

I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot dangling.

I’m rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?

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.

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.

"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)

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.

Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

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

What I like about this place is everything runs so true to type,” I said. “The cop on the gate, the shine on the door, the cigarette and check girls, the fat greasy sensual Jew with the tall stately bored showgirl, the well-dressed, drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the night club owner with the soft gray hair and the B-picture mannerisms, and now you — the tall dark torcher with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-boiled vocabulary.

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

To say goodbye is to die a little.

They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don't find out they don't know themselves.

The charged atmosphere made every little thing stand out as a performance, a movement distinct and vastly important. It was one of those hypersensitive moments when all your automatic movements, however long established, however habitual, become separate acts of will. You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all.