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An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

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
Kind
Decadence
Cleverness
Incapable
Except
Poetry
Literature
Age

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She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.
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An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
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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.
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You're broke, eh? I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.
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A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
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Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
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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.
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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?
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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
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He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
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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.
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Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.
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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.
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The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
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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.
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A good title is the title of a successful book.
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I certainly admire people who do things.
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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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Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
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One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
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