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Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

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
Critics
Build
Truth
Home
Great

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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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
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
Raymond Chandler
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There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.
Raymond Chandler
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California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
Raymond Chandler
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The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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California, the department store state.
Raymond Chandler
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You can't have everything, even in California
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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The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
Raymond Chandler
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Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
Raymond Chandler
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I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
Raymond Chandler
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One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
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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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
Raymond Chandler
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But nothing seems to do any good.
Raymond Chandler
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It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
Raymond Chandler