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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
Department
Stores
California
State
States
Best
Everything
Nothing
Store

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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
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I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.
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I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
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The more you reason the less you create.
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The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
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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
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The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.
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I'm killing time and it's dying hard.
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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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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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Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men.
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The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.
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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?
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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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A really good detective never gets married.
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Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
Raymond Chandler
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Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid
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Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
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When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
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He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
Raymond Chandler