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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
Cleverness
Incapable
Except
Poetry
Literature
Age
Kind
Decadence

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He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
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One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
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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.
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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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It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
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I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.
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When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
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Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
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The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement
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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.
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A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.
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As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.
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Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
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Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool, a clever fool - perhaps - but a fool just the same.
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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.
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Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.
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It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.
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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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Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.
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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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