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I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
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
Doors
Ought
Start
Desk
Didn
Desks
Enough
Hung
Good
Locked
Hidden
Door
More quotes by Raymond Chandler
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.
Raymond Chandler
Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
Raymond Chandler
They write them long because they can't write them short.
Raymond Chandler
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?
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
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.
Raymond Chandler
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
You can't have everything, even in California
Raymond Chandler
Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.
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
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.
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
Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
Raymond Chandler
Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.
Raymond Chandler
There are no vital and significant forms of art there is only art, and precious little of that.
Raymond Chandler
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.
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
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.
Raymond Chandler
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
Raymond Chandler