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I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

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
Better
Need
Gun
Take
Worked
Needs
Soon
Thing
Along
Knew
Anyone
Didn

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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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When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Raymond Chandler
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Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Raymond Chandler
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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
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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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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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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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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
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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You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
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
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She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
Raymond Chandler
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All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
Raymond Chandler
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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
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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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The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
Raymond Chandler
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There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
Raymond Chandler