Quotes from Raymond Chandler

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

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

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

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

I went out the kitchen to make coffee - yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.

She had eyes like strange sins.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.

I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

I'm not a young man. I'm old, tired and full of no coffee.

Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.

The more you reason the less you create.

Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.

Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway.

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

Shake your business up and pour it. I don't have all day.

California, the department store state.

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.