Top 300 Raymond Chandler Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes.”

— Raymond Chandler

254. “She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it.”

— Raymond Chandler

255. “She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.”

— Raymond Chandler

256. “But nothing seems to do any good.”

— Raymond Chandler

257. “Police business,” he said almost gently, “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. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.”

— Raymond Chandler

258. “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

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

— Raymond Chandler

260. “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

261. “I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

263. “Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath.”

— Raymond Chandler

264. “It was a nice walk, if you like grunting.”

— Raymond Chandler

265. “I suppose you do this to all the clients,” she said softly.”

— Raymond Chandler

266. “Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.”

— Raymond Chandler

267. “I wouldn’t say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors.”

— Raymond Chandler

268. “The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

— Raymond Chandler

269. “The next hour was three hours long.”

— Raymond Chandler

270. “My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.”

— Raymond Chandler

271. “It’s a swell theory,” I said. “Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.”

— Raymond Chandler

272. “She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man’s tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread.”

— Raymond Chandler

273. “She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded.”

— Raymond Chandler

274. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

— Raymond Chandler

275. “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”

— Raymond Chandler

276. “Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment.” – on Hollywood.”

— Raymond Chandler

277. “All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.”

— Raymond Chandler

278. “Or can I call you Phil?” “Sure.” “You can can me Vivian.” “Thanks, Mrs. Regan.” “Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.”

— Raymond Chandler

279. “It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.”

— Raymond Chandler

280. “It’s a sordid life, but I’m used to it.”

— Raymond Chandler

281. “Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.”

— Raymond Chandler

282. “They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don’t find out they don’t know themselves.”

— Raymond Chandler

283. “If God were omnipresent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium.”

— Raymond Chandler

284. “The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip Marlowe... Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with same legend which is not locked. Come on in – there’s nobody here but me an a big bluebottle fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.”

— Raymond Chandler

285. “Her eyes ate me.”

— Raymond Chandler

286. “Uh-huh. Could be,′ I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn’t have a damn thing more to say.”

— Raymond Chandler

287. “Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the sidewalk. Big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying giggling girls across the bad places. The rain drummed hard on the roof of the car and the burbank top began to leak. A pool of water formed on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.”

— Raymond Chandler

288. “After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screens and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.”

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

290. “I got back on the runway and took all of it and some of the hedge and gave the front door the heavy shoulder. This was foolish. About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door. All it did was hurt my shoulder and make me mad.”

— Raymond Chandler

291. “The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.”

— Raymond Chandler

292. “Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us – ” “This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.” “He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.”

— Raymond Chandler

293. “Tsk, tsk,” I said, not moving at all. “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. Put it down and don’t be silly, Joe.”

— Raymond Chandler

294. “Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He’s high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always someone else’s money he’s adding up.”

— Raymond Chandler

295. “He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He’s going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he’s apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.”

— Raymond Chandler

296. “Oh sure, I’m her husband. That’s what the record says. I’m the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundred-dollar whorehouse.”

— Raymond Chandler

297. “If I had a razor, I’d cut your throat – just to see what ran out of it.”

— Raymond Chandler

298. “Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy. “Ever kill a man, Marlowe?” “Yes.” “Nasty feeling, isn’t it?” “Some people like it.” His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they looked vague. “How could they?”

— Raymond Chandler

299. “You lied to him and you drank your cyanide like a little gentleman. You died like a poisoned rat, Harry, but you’re no rat to me.”

— Raymond Chandler

300. “The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.”

— Raymond Chandler