Raymond Chandler Quotes

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

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.

My theory was that readers just thought they cared nothing but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialog and description. The things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers.

To hell with the rich, they make me sick.

I wouldn't say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors

"Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

"They say money don't stink," he said. "I sometimes wonder."

Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.

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

There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.

I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.

The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.

Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten — when Larry Cobb was sober.