Quotes from Raymond Chandler

It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.' 'That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said.

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

Oh sure, I'm her husband. That's what the record says. I'm the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse.

I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.

A occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me.

I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don't read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike......I threw the paper into the corner and turned on the TV set. After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good.

Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.

I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview.

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. (The King in Yellow)

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

The car slid along Los Angeles to Fifth, east to San Pedro, south again for block after block, quiet blocks and loud blocks, blocks where silent men sat on shaky front porches and blocks where noisy young toughs of both colors snarled and wise-cracked at one another in front of cheap restaurants and drug-stores and beer parlors full of slot machines. (Pickup on Noon Street)

Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else.

Her voice was as dead as the summer before last. (Nevada Gas)

Ohls showed the motor-cycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night's hard rain hadn't even dented.

Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath.

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

She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen's lunch

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the Big Sleep...

It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.

You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

We were very much in love—the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

I'm a weak character, without guts or ambition. I caught the brass ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn't gold. A guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter.