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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
Story
Cannot
Stories
Writing
Good
Distilled
Devised
More quotes by 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
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
Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.
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
The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.
Raymond Chandler
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.
Raymond Chandler
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
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
Raymond Chandler
Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
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
The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
Raymond Chandler
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
Raymond Chandler
They write them long because they can't write them short.
Raymond Chandler
California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
Raymond Chandler
The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
Raymond Chandler
The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.
Raymond Chandler
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
Raymond Chandler
I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.
Raymond Chandler
A really good detective never gets married.
Raymond Chandler
