Quotes from Raymond Chandler

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.

Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

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.

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.

Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency.

It is not a fragrant world.

"A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy," he said dryly.

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.

I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They'd get around to it.

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.

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

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.

Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

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.

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.

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.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

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.

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.