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They write them long because they can't write them short.

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
Writing
Long
Short
Language
Write
Book

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
Raymond Chandler
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Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
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.
Raymond Chandler
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I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
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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An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler
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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.
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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However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
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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You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.
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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The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.
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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Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
Raymond Chandler
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He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.
Raymond Chandler
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But nothing seems to do any good.
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