Raymond Chandler

“The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants.”

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

“Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than you'll do the truth good. Or until I'm hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”

“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.”

“The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.”

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

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

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

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”

“The more you reason the less you create.”

“The living room was still dark, because of the heavy growth of the shrubbery the owner had allowed to mask the windows. I put a lamp on and mooched a cigarette. I lit it. I stared down at him. I rumpled my hair which was already rumpled. I put the old tired grin on my face.”

“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.”

“He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.”

“I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.”

“A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.”

“That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep.”

“It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.”

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

“Una tipa que sonaba a borracha perdida cantaba ''Frankie and Johnny'' en versión marinera, con una voz que ni el whisky había logrado mejorar.”

“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”

“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.”

“Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”

“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.”

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

“At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”

“The stores along Hollywood Boulevard were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible- it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early.”

“Her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution.”

“A occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me.”

“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.”

“I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase.It seemed like a lot of copper.”

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

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

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

“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

“She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.”

“You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.”

“As for asking favors or handouts, no.'But you'll take them from a stranger.'He looked me straight in the eye. 'The stranger can keep going and pretend not to hear.”

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.”

“The latter think the shortest distance between two points is from a blonde to a bed.”

“Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what is sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. 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.”

“There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.”

“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”

“One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is ever happy anywhere.”

“Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella.”

“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”

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

“Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cookies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them. (from) "The High Window”