Raymond Chandler Quotes

To say goodbye is to die a little.

~ Raymond Chandler

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

~ Raymond Chandler

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.

~ Raymond Chandler

There are two kinds of truth, The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

~ Raymond Chandler

Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than you'll do the truth good. Or until I'm hauled before somebody that can make me talk.

~ Raymond Chandler

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

~ Raymond Chandler

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

~ Raymond Chandler

In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.

~ Raymond Chandler

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes.

~ Raymond Chandler

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridicu

~ Raymond Chandler

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

~ Raymond Chandler

You like it in jail?It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

~ Raymond Chandler

You like it in jail?''It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

~ Raymond Chandler

Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get...

~ Raymond Chandler

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.

~ Raymond Chandler

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

~ Raymond Chandler

I like games of chance, including women.

~ Raymond Chandler

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

~ Raymond Chandler

You're broke, eh?I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

~ Raymond Chandler

Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way.

~ Raymond Chandler

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

~ Raymond Chandler

One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.

~ Raymond Chandler

I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.

~ Raymond Chandler

A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet.

~ Raymond Chandler

She was a cute as a washtub.

~ Raymond Chandler

It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.''That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said.

~ Raymond Chandler

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

~ Raymond Chandler

You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.

~ Raymond Chandler

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

~ Raymond Chandler

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.

~ Raymond Chandler

Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

~ Raymond Chandler

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

~ Raymond Chandler

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.

~ Raymond Chandler

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.

~ Raymond Chandler

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

~ Raymond Chandler

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

~ Raymond Chandler

It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.

~ Raymond Chandler

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

~ Raymond Chandler

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

~ Raymond Chandler

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

~ Raymond Chandler