Raymond Chandler Quotes
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It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.
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Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.
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If you believe in an idea, you don't own you, it owns you.
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Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
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If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
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There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
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Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't 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.
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A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.
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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. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
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As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
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All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
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I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.
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What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
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Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.
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Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
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In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
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Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.
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One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.
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You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.
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The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
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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.
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Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
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It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
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Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.
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You're broke, eh?" I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.
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She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
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From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
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Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.
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[As a screenwriter] 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.
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She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
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