Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Raymond Chandler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1888
Born: July 23
Died: 1959
Died: March 26
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Raymond Thornton Chandler
Made
Progress
Never
Answers
Discuss
Show
Critic
Shows
Absolutes
Three
Critics
Take
Rules
Writing
Answer
Work
Advice

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

Image
There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.
Raymond Chandler
Image
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
Raymond Chandler
Image
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
Raymond Chandler
Image
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
Image
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
Raymond Chandler
Image
Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
Raymond Chandler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
Raymond Chandler
Image
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
Image
LA doesn't have the heart of a paper cup.
Raymond Chandler
Image
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
Image
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
Raymond Chandler
Image
I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.
Raymond Chandler
Image
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler
Image
The streets were dark with something more then night.
Raymond Chandler
Image
I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
Raymond Chandler
Image
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
Raymond Chandler
Image
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
Image
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.
Raymond Chandler