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 momen… - Raymond Chandler

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons - and are also lucky - justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

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.

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