Raymond Chandler Quotes

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.

Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. (The King in Yellow)

seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

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

The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.

down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero

The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow)

To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips. (...) Just another four-flusher.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.

Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act