Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The room was empty. It was full of silence and the memory of a nice perfume.”

— Raymond Chandler

152. “The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building.”

— Raymond Chandler

153. “I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don’t want it any more.”

— Raymond Chandler

154. “Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men.”

— Raymond Chandler

155. “I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can’t tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.”

— Raymond Chandler

156. “She sighed. “All men are the same.” “So are all women – after the first nine.”

— Raymond Chandler

157. “Shake your business up and pour it. I don’t have all day.”

— Raymond Chandler

158. “There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish.”

— Raymond Chandler

159. “Do you like orchids?’ ‘Not particularly,’ I said. The General half closed his eyes. ‘They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.’ I.”

— Raymond Chandler

160. “I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.”

— Raymond Chandler

161. “If you believe in an idea, you don’t own you, it owns you.”

— Raymond Chandler

162. “She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.”

— Raymond Chandler

163. “You mean something happened to him?” Her voice faded off into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.”

— Raymond Chandler

164. “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.”

— Raymond Chandler

165. “No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront.”

— Raymond Chandler

166. “A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.”

— Raymond Chandler

167. “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

— Raymond Chandler

168. “The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on. I went back to my desk, dropped the bottle of whiskey back into the drawer, shut the drawer and sat down again.”

— Raymond Chandler

169. “Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve a problem.”

— Raymond Chandler

170. “If you don’t leave, I’ll get somebody who will.”

— Raymond Chandler

171. “The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.”

— Raymond Chandler

172. “Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition – hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid.”

— Raymond Chandler

173. “The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”

— Raymond Chandler

174. “I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn’t know about it yet. It’s so hard for women – even nice women – to realise that their bodies are not irresistible.”

— Raymond Chandler

175. “An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.”

— Raymond Chandler

176. “There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”

— Raymond Chandler

177. “Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.”

— Raymond Chandler

178. “Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case... He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions.”

— Raymond Chandler

179. “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.”

— Raymond Chandler

180. “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

— Raymond Chandler

181. “She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.”

— Raymond Chandler

182. “I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it.”

— Raymond Chandler

183. “At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”

— Raymond Chandler

184. “Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.”

— Raymond Chandler

185. “California, the department store state.”

— Raymond Chandler

186. “The law is where you buy it and what you pay for it.”

— Raymond Chandler

187. “Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.”

— Raymond Chandler

188. “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.”

— Raymond Chandler

189. “Do I have to be polite?” I asked. “Or can I just be natural?”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

191. “Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten – when Larry Cobb was sober.”

— Raymond Chandler

192. “Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.”

— Raymond Chandler

193. “And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.”

— Raymond Chandler

194. “The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars’ place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night-to see that the guests didn’t bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house.”

— Raymond Chandler

195. “Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

197. “It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.”

— Raymond Chandler

198. “I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”

— Raymond Chandler

199. “His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.”

— Raymond Chandler

200. “An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”

— Raymond Chandler