Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

70. “I bet she snaps a mean garter.”

— Raymond Chandler

71. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

74. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.”

— Raymond Chandler

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

81. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “She had eyes like strange sins.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

93. “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

94. “I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

97. “I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.”

— Raymond Chandler

98. “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

99. “The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler