RCRaymond Chandler

68 collected words

Raymond Chandler

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

02Undated

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

Raymond Chandler / quote

03Undated

She was a cute as a washtub.

Raymond Chandler / quote

04Undated

It's 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 can't be sure.''That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said.

Raymond Chandler / quote

05Undated

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

Raymond Chandler / quote

06Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

07Undated

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

Raymond Chandler / quote

08Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

09Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

10Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

11Undated

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 wouldn't 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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

12Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

13Undated

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

Raymond Chandler / quote

14Undated

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

Raymond Chandler / quote

15Undated

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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

16Undated

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

Raymond Chandler / quote

17Undated

So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer.""Me? How?""The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read.""Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them."She didn't say anything. "I didn't 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.

Raymond Chandler / quote

18Undated

It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.

Raymond Chandler / quote

19Undated

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

Raymond Chandler / quote

20Undated

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

Raymond Chandler / quote

21Undated

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

Raymond Chandler / quote

22Undated

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.

Raymond Chandler / quote

23Undated

You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime. (I'll Be Waiting)

Raymond Chandler / quote

24Undated

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.

Raymond Chandler / quote