Raymond Chandler Quotes

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.

~ Raymond Chandler

You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime. (I'll Be Waiting)

~ Raymond Chandler

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.

~ Raymond Chandler

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

~ Raymond Chandler

A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

~ Raymond Chandler

She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.

~ Raymond Chandler

The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.

~ Raymond Chandler

The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.

~ Raymond Chandler

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.

~ Raymond Chandler

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

~ Raymond Chandler

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful.

~ Raymond Chandler

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

~ Raymond Chandler

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detach

~ Raymond Chandler

A good title is the title of a successful book.

~ Raymond Chandler

The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently he can't be sure. When he can no longer throw his high hard one he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He just doesn't walk off the mound and weep.

~ Raymond Chandler

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.

~ Raymond Chandler

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.

~ Raymond Chandler

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

~ Raymond Chandler

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

~ Raymond Chandler

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

~ Raymond Chandler

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

~ Raymond Chandler

It is not a fragrant world.

~ Raymond Chandler