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I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
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
Country
Hats
Life
Gun
Drink
Room
Rooms
Coat
Needed
Coats
Went
Insurance
Home
Vacation
More quotes by Raymond Chandler
All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
Raymond Chandler
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
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
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
Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
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
I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
Raymond Chandler
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
Raymond Chandler
You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
Raymond Chandler
The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
Raymond Chandler
A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
Raymond Chandler
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler
She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.
Raymond Chandler
Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
Raymond Chandler
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.
Raymond Chandler
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
There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
Raymond Chandler
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
Raymond Chandler
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
