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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?

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
Kind
Utterly
Something
Cheap
Men
Taken
Shoddy
Like
Greater
Claw
Understanding
Claws
Lost
Intellectuals
Writing
Prestige
Made
Gifted

More quotes by Raymond Chandler

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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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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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I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
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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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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.
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Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool, a clever fool - perhaps - but a fool just the same.
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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
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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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She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
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Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
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It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
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Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
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All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
Raymond Chandler
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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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Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.
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A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.
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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.
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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.
Raymond Chandler
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She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.
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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