Raymond Chandler
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.Collection: Poetry
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.Collection: Intelligence
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.Collection: Food
It is not a fragrant world.Collection: Society
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.Collection: Smile
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
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.
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.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
The streets were dark with something more than night.
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.
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
A really good detective never gets married.
The more you reason the less you create.
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
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.
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.
I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
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.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
I certainly admire people who do things.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any worldCollection: Hero
I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.Collection: Beer
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.Collection: Traps
If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.Collection: Community
Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never hadCollection: People
I'm killing time and it's dying hard.Collection: Dying
There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.Collection: Art
She was kind of girl who'd eat all your cashews and leave you with nothing but peanuts and filberts.Collection: Girl
I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.Collection: Stars
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.Collection: Art
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.Collection: Beauty
I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.Collection: Want
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.Collection: Drinking
I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.Collection: Years
The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Mean
She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.Collection: Air