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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.

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
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Made
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Spoil
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Developed
Hollywood
Talent
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More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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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An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Raymond Chandler
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Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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A really good detective never gets married.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
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There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
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I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
Raymond Chandler
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The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
Raymond Chandler
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He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
Raymond Chandler
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When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
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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She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.
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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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.
Raymond Chandler
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I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.
Raymond Chandler