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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.

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
Take
Writing
Like
Changing
Advice
Anyone
Write
Anything
Ever

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
Raymond Chandler
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However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
Raymond Chandler
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Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
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.
Raymond Chandler
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I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler
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All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
Raymond Chandler
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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
Raymond Chandler
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The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
Raymond Chandler
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A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)
Raymond Chandler
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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
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Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.
Raymond Chandler