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
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Raymond Chandler quotes
It is not a fragrant world.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
A really good detective never gets married.
Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
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
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.
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
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.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
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.
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
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.
The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.
The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.
The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called "significant literature" will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
The streets were dark with something more than night.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
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