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As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.

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
Turn
Virgins
Probably
Acid
Public
Stamps
Books
Desks
Turns
Faced
Littles
Library
Stamp
Little
Behinds
Dates
Book
Behind
Libraries

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
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Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
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There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.
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There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
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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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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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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
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The more you reason the less you create.
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Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
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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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Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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
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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
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I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.
Raymond Chandler