Raymond Chandler
The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.Collection: Art
Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on HollywoodCollection: Mistake
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.Collection: Beautiful
Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.Collection: Crazy
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.Collection: Fog
California, the department store state.Collection: California
Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.Collection: Struggle
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.Collection: Mind
You can't have everything, even in CaliforniaCollection: Inspiration
If you liked a book, don't meet the authorCollection: Book
The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.Collection: Art
I'm a very smart guy. I haven't a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops . . . I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you'll think of me, I'll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.Collection: Smart
The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.Collection: Reading
Could she *be* anymore out of my league?Collection: League
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.Collection: God
Dames lie about anything - just for practice.Collection: Lying
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.Collection: Girl
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.Collection: Gun
All reading for pleasure is entertainment.Collection: Reading
A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.Collection: Fall
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.Collection: Art
All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.Collection: Art
Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.Collection: Marriage
I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.Collection: Hate
The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.Collection: Book
The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.Collection: Jobs
Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.Collection: Home
I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful.Collection: Air
May I wish for you the knowledge...that marriages do not take place, they are made by hand; that there is always an element of discipline involved; that however perfect the honeymoon, the time will come, however brief it is, when you wish she would fall downstairs and break a leg. This goes for her too. But the mood will pass, if you give it time.Collection: Fall
Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.Collection: Art
The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.Collection: Powerful
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.Collection: Men
I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar – that’s wonderful.Collection: Firsts