Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The challenge is to write about real things magically.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

204. “Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.”

— Raymond Chandler

205. “Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

208. “It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.”

— Raymond Chandler

209. “Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.”

— Raymond Chandler

210. “Her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution.”

— Raymond Chandler

211. “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

212. “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

213. “She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked at me as if I had said a dirty word.”

— Raymond Chandler

214. “I do a great deal of research – particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

223. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

225. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

229. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

232. “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

233. “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

234. “California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again.”

— Raymond Chandler

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “She was a cute as a washtub.”

— Raymond Chandler

240. “He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.”

— Raymond Chandler

241. “Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.”

— Raymond Chandler

242. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

244. “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

245. “Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else.”

— Raymond Chandler

246. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

248. “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

249. “One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?” Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?” “Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.” Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.”

— Raymond Chandler

250. “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