you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes. - Raymond Chandler

Overhead the rain still pounded, with a remote sound, as if it was somebody else's rain.

"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."

(Letter, April 19, 1951)

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