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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.

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
Also
Exactly
Buttons
May
Answer
Fairness
Ever
Lucky
Intended
Right
Answers
Mechanism
Justice
Imperfect
Law
Presses
Show
Press
Shows
Ethics
Imperfection

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
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I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
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Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
Raymond Chandler
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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?
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Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
Raymond Chandler
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When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
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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.
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When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.
Raymond Chandler
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I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.
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It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
Raymond Chandler
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A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.
Raymond Chandler
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I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler
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There are no vital and significant forms of art there is only art, and precious little of that.
Raymond Chandler
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If you liked a book, don't meet the author
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
Raymond Chandler
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Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.
Raymond Chandler
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I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.
Raymond Chandler
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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