Quotes from Raymond Chandler

Go on," he said, in a voice the size of a marble.

I put the doped whiskey down where he could reach it, if his hands hadn't been strapped.

He's just a lost dog," she added with a cool smile. "Perhaps you can find a home for him. He's housebroken—more or less." And

One day, everything will be like before again. And it is not like it.

After a while I got in past the velvet rope and ate one of Rudy's world-famous Salisbury steaks, which is hamburger on a slab of burnt wood, ringed with browned-over mashed potato, supported by fried onion rings and one of those mixed up salads which men will eat with complete docility in restaurants, although they would probably start yelling if their wives tried to feed them one at home.

It is always the little things that make you sore.

Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered.

My left foot felt fine. It didn't have an ache in it. So I had to kick the corner of the bed with it.

I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a

Es gibt nichts, was leerer aussieht als ein leeres Schwimmbecken

draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising

I walked along to the double doors and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn't any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.

Esa es la diferencia entre delito y negocio. Para los negocios necesitas capital. A veces me parece que es la única diferencia.

Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.

She went out slowly. The way she did it hadn't been learned at business college.

Good-bye, Linda. I hope you find what you want.' 'Good-bye,' she said coldly. 'I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it any more.

when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

So they didn't scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Chandler's first book is famously incoherent

Trouble is my business," I said. "Twenty-five a day and guarantee of two-fifty, if I pull the job.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.

thinking. Maybe it would be better if you called the police." "Call them yourself. I haven't anything to tell then." "You want me to?