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Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

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
Written
Everything
Mind
Expresses
Vitality
Dull
Minds
Subjects

More quotes by 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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It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.
Raymond Chandler
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Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
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.
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The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
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California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
Raymond Chandler
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But nothing seems to do any good.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.
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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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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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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The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
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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The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
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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He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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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Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.
Raymond Chandler