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Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

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
Protect
Half
Energy
Trying
Never
Life
People
Using
Dignity

More quotes by 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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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
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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
Raymond Chandler
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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?
Raymond Chandler
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California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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A good title is the title of a successful book.
Raymond Chandler
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The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
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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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
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From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
Raymond Chandler
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The more you reason the less you create.
Raymond Chandler
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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
Raymond Chandler
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I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
Raymond Chandler
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They write them long because they can't write them short.
Raymond Chandler
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I certainly admire people who do things.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement
Raymond Chandler
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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
Raymond Chandler
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I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler