Raymond Chandler
Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.Collection: Writing
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.Collection: Useless
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.Collection: Glasses
As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.Collection: Men
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.Collection: Splits
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.Collection: Doors
The challenge is to write about real things magically.Collection: Real
Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on the circulation and you know what circulation depends on.Collection: Sex
She had eyes like strange sins.Collection: Eye
She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.Collection: War
I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability.Collection: Hate
Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.Collection: Perfect
It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.Collection: Funny
Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.Collection: Vases
California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.Collection: California
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.Collection: Husband
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Real
He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.Collection: Swings
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.Collection: Goodbye
That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.Collection: Book
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.Collection: Art
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.Collection: Long
The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.Collection: Reading
The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.Collection: Loneliness
The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.Collection: Writing
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.Collection: Iron
And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.Collection: Beer
You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.Collection: Two
The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Love
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.Collection: Hangover
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.Collection: Writing
The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.Collection: Couple
She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.Collection: Taj Mahal
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.Collection: Book
She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.Collection: Sound
Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be." Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.Collection: Mean
The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.Collection: War
There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.Collection: Honesty
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.Collection: Integrity
The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn't take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should do the best he can without straining at it. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won't get it. And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back.Collection: Wise
A good title is the title of a successful book.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Real
There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.Collection: Jobs
When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] 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. (p. 262)Collection: Doors
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.Collection: This Generation
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.Collection: Trouble