A really good detective never gets married.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
- Raymond Chandler Quote
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

The streets were dark with something more than night.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
- Raymond Chandler Quote

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
- Raymond Chandler Quote