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California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

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
State
States
Best
Everything
Nothing
Store
Department
Stores

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Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
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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.
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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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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.
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The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
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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.
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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.
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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
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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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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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From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
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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.
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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.
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Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
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It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.
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The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
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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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I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
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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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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
Raymond Chandler