Quotes from Raymond Chandler

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

The more you reason the less you create.

I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

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

If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

A really good detective never gets married.

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.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

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

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.