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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
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
Cannot
Stories
Writing
Good
Distilled
Devised
Story
More quotes by Raymond Chandler
You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.
Raymond Chandler
All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
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
You're broke, eh? I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
Raymond Chandler
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
Raymond Chandler
It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.
Raymond Chandler
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
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
But nothing seems to do any good.
Raymond Chandler
A really good detective never gets married.
Raymond Chandler
She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.
Raymond Chandler
Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
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
A good title is the title of a successful book.
Raymond Chandler
