Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar – that’s wonderful.”

— Raymond Chandler

52. “I went out the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men.”

— Raymond Chandler

53. “The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”

— Raymond Chandler

54. “I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”

— Raymond Chandler

55. “Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.”

— Raymond Chandler

56. “They don’t want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can’t use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.”

— Raymond Chandler

57. “A slice of spumoni wouldn’t have melted on her now.”

— Raymond Chandler

58. “It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.”

— Raymond Chandler

59. “Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.”

— Raymond Chandler

60. “An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. Light.”

— Raymond Chandler

61. “The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.”

— Raymond Chandler

62. “I suppose all writers are crazy, but if they are any good, I believe they have a terrible honesty.”

— Raymond Chandler

63. “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

64. “LA doesn’t have the heart of a paper cup.”

— Raymond Chandler

65. “The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.”

— Raymond Chandler

66. “I’m rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?”

— Raymond Chandler

67. “This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.”

— Raymond Chandler

68. “Nice: meaning I’m going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them – to you.”

— Raymond Chandler

69. “On a dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.”

— Raymond Chandler

70. “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

71. “I’m all done with hating you. It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”

— Raymond Chandler

72. “I bet she snaps a mean garter.”

— Raymond Chandler

73. “She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”

— Raymond Chandler

74. “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, wherever you happened to be – she had it.”

— Raymond Chandler

75. “My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you.”

— Raymond Chandler

76. “She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term I’ll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”

— Raymond Chandler

77. “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

— Raymond Chandler

78. “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

80. “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

— Raymond Chandler

81. “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it.”

— Raymond Chandler

82. “I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets.”

— Raymond Chandler

83. “I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”

— Raymond Chandler

84. “Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.”

— Raymond Chandler

85. “Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”

— Raymond Chandler

86. “A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

— Raymond Chandler

87. “The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don’t mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren’t any of those.”

— Raymond Chandler

88. “I’m in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.”

— Raymond Chandler

89. “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

90. “A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.”

— Raymond Chandler

91. “Mostly I just kill time,” he said, “and it dies hard.”

— Raymond Chandler

92. “She had eyes like strange sins.”

— Raymond Chandler

93. “The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.”

— Raymond Chandler

94. “It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.”

— Raymond Chandler

95. “The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.”

— Raymond Chandler

96. “You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.”

— Raymond Chandler

97. “Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees.”

— Raymond Chandler

98. “The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

— Raymond Chandler

99. “A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

— Raymond Chandler

100. “She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.”

— Raymond Chandler