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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

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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
Thing
Sneer
Make
Durable
Time
Investment
Valuable
Writer
Single
Style

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When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.
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He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
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Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
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You can't have everything, even in California
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A really good detective never gets married.
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A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)
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I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.
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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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A good title is the title of a successful book.
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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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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.
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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.
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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
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If you liked a book, don't meet the author
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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.
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A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.
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The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.
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Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
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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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