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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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Raymond Chandler
Age: 70 †
Born: 1888
Born: July 23
Died: 1959
Died: March 26
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Raymond Thornton Chandler
Complete
Generation
Generations
Tensions
Novel
Simplest
Possible
Pattern
Live
Tension
Patterns
Murder

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All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
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The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
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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.
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A good story cannot be devised it has to be distilled.
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A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else.
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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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When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.
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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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One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
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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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I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.
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California, the department store state.
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Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
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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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As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
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Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.
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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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The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by 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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