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Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
Raymond Chandler
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Raymond Chandler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1888
Born: July 23
Died: 1959
Died: March 26
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Raymond Thornton Chandler
Littles
Writer
Little
Fiction
Everything
Takes
Nothing
Desire
Need
Write
Learns
Needs
Away
Craft
Writing
Art
Crafts
Ends
Tricks
More quotes by Raymond Chandler
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
Raymond Chandler
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
Raymond Chandler
Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.
Raymond Chandler
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.
Raymond Chandler
I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
Raymond Chandler
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
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
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
Raymond Chandler
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
Raymond Chandler
I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.
Raymond Chandler
Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.
Raymond Chandler
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.
Raymond Chandler
A good title is the title of a successful book.
Raymond Chandler
One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
Raymond Chandler
James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.
Raymond Chandler
He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
Raymond Chandler
What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
Raymond Chandler
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
Raymond Chandler
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
Raymond Chandler