Quotes from Raymond Chandler

He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.

and the rain blew in under the porch, not as cold as her lips.

He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look.

You don't have to be a psychic to sell oriental rugs. You only have to be a psychic to buy them.

When a woman is a really good driver she is just about perfect.

We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.

Her hair by daylight was pure auburn and on it she wore a hat with a crown the size of a whiskey glass and a brim you could have wrapped the week's laundry in. She wore it at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, so that the edge of the brim just missed her shoulder. In spite of that it looked smart. Perhaps because of that. She

I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.

Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn't like it.

That's the trouble with cops. You're all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.

To say good-bye is to die a little.

The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars' place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night—to see that the guests didn't bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house.

He says you make good coffee and you get up kind of late in the mornings and are apt to run to a very bright line of chatter and that we should believe anything you say, provided we can check it by five independent witnesses.

He looked up rather sadly. "So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.

A thousand white houses built up and down the hills, ten thousand lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close, on account of the patrol.

Intentan ser honestos, pero la honestidad es un arte. El mal escritor es deshonesto sin saberlo, y el escritor más o menos bueno puede que sea deshonesto porque no sabe sobre qué ser honesto.

If a well man prays, that's faith. A sick man prays and he is just scared. Nuts to prayer. This is the world you made and you make it all by yourself and what little outside help you got – well, you made that too. Stop praying, you jerk.

I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

smoke if you had anything to smoke, and think if you had anything to think about that didn't make you feel worse than not thinking at all.

You can't tell anything by my voice. I'm a detective. Heard from him how?

I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa.

He looks at you or doesn't. You look at him. He says nothing and you say nothing. There is nothing to communicate.

She made a humph noise and played another card. She got the ace of diamonds up to the top line. "The ace of clubs is buried, darn it. I'm not going to get it out in time." "Kind of slide it out," I said, "when you're not looking