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The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

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
Order
Live
Writing
Something
Arrive
Actual
Rest
Point

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.
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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.
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I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
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It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
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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.
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Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had
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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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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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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.
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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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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
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One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
Raymond Chandler
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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
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When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler
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I certainly admire people who do things.
Raymond Chandler
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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
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Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.
Raymond Chandler
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The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
Raymond Chandler
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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