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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
Age
Kind
Decadence
Cleverness
Incapable
Except
Poetry
Literature

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In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
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They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.
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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.
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I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.
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Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
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However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
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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.
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You can't have everything, even in California
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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.
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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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Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
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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.
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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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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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It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.
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The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
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Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
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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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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
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The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
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