Quotes from Raymond Chandler

She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.

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.

Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be.

That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment. ( A Qualified Farewell )

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.

Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they? It takes about three years. Three years? He looked shocked. Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment. - on Hollywood

I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me—and I didn't think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.

had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.

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.

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.

I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.

I said: Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this. Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish.

If you liked a book, don't meet the author.

On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds. A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.

It's a swell theory, I said. Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody's eye.

I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.

He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.