Words matter. These are the best Raymond Chandler Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
The more you reason the less you create.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
It is not a fragrant world.
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.
The streets were dark with something more than night.
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
A really good detective never gets married.
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.
I do a great deal of research – particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
I certainly admire people who do things.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
