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You can't have everything, even in California
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
Everything
Even
California
Inspiration
More quotes by Raymond Chandler
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
Raymond Chandler
You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
Raymond Chandler
When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.
Raymond Chandler
I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
Raymond Chandler
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
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
Raymond Chandler
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
It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.
Raymond Chandler
The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
Raymond Chandler
James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.
Raymond Chandler
Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
Raymond Chandler
Could she *be* anymore out of my league?
Raymond Chandler
As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.
Raymond Chandler
I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.
Raymond Chandler
LA doesn't have the heart of a paper cup.
Raymond Chandler
An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Raymond Chandler
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
Raymond Chandler
A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
Raymond Chandler
