Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

53. “He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.”

— Raymond Chandler

54. “It’s so hard for women – even nice women – to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.”

— Raymond Chandler

55. “The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.”

— Raymond Chandler

56. “You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women.”

— Raymond Chandler

57. “Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.”

— Raymond Chandler

58. “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”

— Raymond Chandler

59. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

60. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.”

— Raymond Chandler

61. “We were very much in love – the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.”

— Raymond Chandler

62. “Two very simple rules: A. You don’t have to write. B. You can’t do anything else The rest comes of itself.”

— Raymond Chandler

63. “The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”

— Raymond Chandler

64. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

67. “The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.”

— Raymond Chandler

68. “The challenge is to write about real things magically.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

76. “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

77. “They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”

— Raymond Chandler

78. “They write them long because they can’t write them short.”

— Raymond Chandler

79. “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

80. “When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.”

— Raymond Chandler

81. “I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.”

— Raymond Chandler

82. “I like games of chance, including women.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Raymond Chandler

86. “I bet she snaps a mean garter.”

— Raymond Chandler

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

91. “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

92. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler