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

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
Writing
Novel
Published
Least
Revealed
Law
Novels
Reading
Solution
Half
Inevitable
Seems
Solutions
Book
Mystery
Idaho
Must
Seem
Violate

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The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
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Could she *be* anymore out of my league?
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I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
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Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
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It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.
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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
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There are no vital and significant forms of art there is only art, and precious little of that.
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The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement
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I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
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Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
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The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
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In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
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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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When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
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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.
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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.
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I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.
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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.
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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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