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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
Murder
Complete
Generation
Generations
Tensions
Novel
Simplest
Possible
Pattern
Live
Tension
Patterns
More quotes by Raymond Chandler
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
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
Raymond Chandler
I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
Raymond Chandler
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
Raymond Chandler
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
Raymond Chandler
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
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
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
Raymond Chandler
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
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
A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)
Raymond Chandler
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
Raymond Chandler
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
Raymond Chandler
You can't have everything, even in California
Raymond Chandler
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Raymond Chandler
The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
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.
Raymond Chandler
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
Raymond Chandler