Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I do a great deal of research – particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

203. “If people could deal with each other honestly, they would not need agents.”

— Raymond Chandler

204. “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

205. “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

206. “I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.” “I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.”

— Raymond Chandler

207. “The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.”

— Raymond Chandler

208. “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

209. “There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Carne knew all of them.”

— Raymond Chandler

210. “All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.”

— Raymond Chandler

211. “All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.”

— Raymond Chandler

212. “The latter think the shortest distance between two points is from a blonde to a bed.”

— Raymond Chandler

213. “As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”

— Raymond Chandler

214. “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

215. “Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.”

— Raymond Chandler

216. “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.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

218. “Dames lie about anything – just for practice.”

— Raymond Chandler

219. “You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.”

— Raymond Chandler

220. “The pursuit of knowledge, brother, is the askin’ of many questions.”

— Raymond Chandler

221. “Tall, aren’t you? I didn’t mean to be.”

— Raymond Chandler

222. “One would think a writer would be happy here – if a writer is every happy anywhere.”

— Raymond Chandler

223. “However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”

— Raymond Chandler

224. “Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.”

— Raymond Chandler

225. “Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him a domed brown forehead that might at careless glance seemed a dwelling place for brains.”

— Raymond Chandler

226. “So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.”

— Raymond Chandler

227. “Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.”

— Raymond Chandler

228. “She came back with the glass and her fingers, cold from holding the glass, touched mine, and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly, as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and you have been in an enchanted valley.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

230. “He opened the rear door and I got in and sank down into the cushions and George slid under the wheel and started the big car. It moved away from the curb and around the corner with as much noise as a bill makes in a wallet.”

— Raymond Chandler

231. “I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there’s one thing you can be sure of – you’re a late comer to the show.”

— Raymond Chandler

232. “I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.”

— Raymond Chandler

233. “She was a cute as a washtub.”

— Raymond Chandler

234. “I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn’t like, but that’s what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt.”

— Raymond Chandler

235. “Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”

— Raymond Chandler

236. “She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.”

— Raymond Chandler

237. “You can’t tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper.”

— Raymond Chandler

238. “There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.”

— Raymond Chandler

239. “I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass where cows grazed. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But yesterday was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber.”

— Raymond Chandler

240. “A man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.”

— Raymond Chandler

241. “Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.”

— Raymond Chandler

242. “I’m a copper,” he said. “Just a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style.”

— Raymond Chandler

243. “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 passe before it gets into print.”

— Raymond Chandler

244. “Anybody home, son?” “You ought to know.” “How would I know?” “Go – yourself.” “That’s how people get false teeth.” He showed me his in a tight grin.”

— Raymond Chandler

245. “Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.”

— Raymond Chandler

246. “Javonen smiled – very slightly. Call it a down payment on a smile.”

— Raymond Chandler

247. “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

248. “I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really high-class seduction.”

— Raymond Chandler

249. “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

250. “However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.”

— Raymond Chandler