Quotes by Raymond Chandler

Being a copper I like to see the law win. Id like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. Thats what Id like. You and me both lived too long to think Im likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just dont run our country that way.

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

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

I didnt 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.

A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet.

She was a cute as a washtub.

Its goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just cant be sure.Thats one of the qualifications for good hotel help, I said.

Im killing time and its dying hard.

You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

Tall, arent you? she said. I didnt mean to be.Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

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.

I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, This medium is not good, he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldnt have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything.

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 doesnt have to be great writing, it doesnt even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.

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

So you shoot people, she said quietly. Youre a killer.Me? How?The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I dont believe everything I read.Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them.She didnt say anything. I didnt have to, I said. I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at.That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops.Oh, nuts.