Raymond Chandler
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.Collection: Nice
The streets were dark with something more then night.Collection: Dark
There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.Collection: Fun
One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.Collection: Thinking
LA doesn't have the heart of a paper cup.Collection: Heart
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.Collection: Couple
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.Collection: Men
When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.Collection: Gun
Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.Collection: Nice
I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.Collection: Honesty
I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.Collection: Onions
It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.Collection: Silly
The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.Collection: Real
Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.Collection: Mean
The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.Collection: Real
If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.Collection: People
Shake your business up and pour it. I haven't got all day.Collection: Big Sleep
They write them long because they can't write them short.Collection: Book
But nothing seems to do any good.Collection: Seems
She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.Collection: Moving
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.Collection: Moving
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.Collection: House
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.Collection: Clever
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.Collection: Dirty
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.Collection: Money
It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.Collection: Delicate Things
I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.Collection: Art
Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of itCollection: Inspiration
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 movementCollection: Writing
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.Collection: Winter
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Book
James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.Collection: Dirty
It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.Collection: Education
Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.Collection: Eye
I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.Collection: Blonde
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Writing
[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.Collection: Writing
Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.Collection: Art
If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.Collection: Ifs
You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.Collection: Fun
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.Collection: Two
The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.Collection: Too Much
Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.Collection: Said
Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.Collection: Struggle
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.Collection: Drinking
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.Collection: Art