Raymond Chandler

(53 votes)   When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(13 votes)   When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

Raymond Chandler
American, Writer Quotes

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(11 votes)   I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.

Raymond Chandler
American, Writer Quotes

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(11 votes)   It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

Raymond Chandler
American, Writer Quotes

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(7 votes)   When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

Raymond Chandler
American, Writer Quotes

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(305 votes)   Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(292 votes)   The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(233 votes)   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.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(169 votes)   It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(136 votes)   So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(112 votes)   I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passT before it gets into print.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(108 votes)   Its idea of ''production value'' is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(94 votes)   The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(89 votes)   Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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(89 votes)   The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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