Raymond Chandler Quotes

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was an American writer, who was famous and influential in the development of crime fiction. Memorable Raymond Chandler novels inclued: "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940), "The Big Sleep" (1939), and "The Long Goodbye" (1954). Read these quotes from Raymond Chandler's works.

• "It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro."
  - Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling."
  - Goldfish, Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."
  - The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have."
  - Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love."
  - Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."
  - Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball."
  - Raymond Chandler
  
  
• "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