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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
California
Inspiration
Everything
Even

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
Raymond Chandler
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I certainly admire people who do things.
Raymond Chandler
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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
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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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Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
Raymond Chandler
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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
Raymond Chandler
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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
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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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There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
Raymond Chandler
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He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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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Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
Raymond Chandler
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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
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They write them long because they can't write them short.
Raymond Chandler
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As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.
Raymond Chandler
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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
Raymond Chandler
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Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had
Raymond Chandler
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But nothing seems to do any good.
Raymond Chandler
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A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
Raymond Chandler