Quotes from Raymond Chandler

Mostly I just kill time, he said, and it dies hard.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

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.

Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get...

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 of the tricks and has nothing to say.

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.