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Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.

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
Time
Mostly
Kill
Dies
Hard

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
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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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
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Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
Raymond Chandler
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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
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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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 can't have everything, even in California
Raymond Chandler
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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
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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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The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
Raymond Chandler
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They write them long because they can't write them short.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
Raymond Chandler
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Tall, aren't you? she said. I didn't mean to be. Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
Raymond Chandler
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The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
Raymond Chandler
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It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.
Raymond Chandler
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He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
Raymond Chandler
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Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men.
Raymond Chandler
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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