Raymond Chandler Quotes

A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.

By his standards anyone who noticed how many walls the room had would be observant.

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.

If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.

A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film-making. It’s not what films are for.

Some people are better off dead—like your wife and my father for instance.

A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

It wasn’t exactly carelessness; her knowledge of literate English contained such vast areas of desert that she took it for granted that half of what she wrote would be meaningless to her.

By the way, do you ever read the Bible ? I suppose not very often, but I had occasion to the other night and believe me it is a lesson in how not to write for the movies. The worst kind of overwriting. Whole chapters that could have been said in one paragraph. And the dialogue!

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.

Just don’t get too complicated Eddie. When a guy gets too complicated he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy—his luck runs out.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings.

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.