"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. "
— Raymond Chandler

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. "
— Raymond Chandler

"Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. "
— Raymond Chandler

"To say goodbye is to die a little."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"'there is no bad whiskey, there are only some whiskies that aren't as good as others'"
— Raymond Chandler

"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."
— Raymond Chandler

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."
— Raymond Chandler

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He 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 -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. 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 story is the man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. "
— Raymond Chandler (The Simple Art of Murder)

"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself."
— Raymond Chandler (Long Goodbye)

"He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus. I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor."
— Raymond Chandler (Pearls Are a Nuisance)

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."
— Raymond Chandler

"As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

""I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it." "
— Raymond Chandler

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."
— Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely)

"I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

""You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was."
"
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

" I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
Farewell, My Lovely "
— Raymond Chandler

"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency."
— Raymond Chandler

"He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
"
— Raymond Chandler (The Simple Art of Murder)

"The streets were dark with something more then night."
— Raymond Chandler

"I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk."
— Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister)

"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
"
— Raymond Chandler

"A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong."
— Raymond Chandler (Pearls Are a Nuisance)

"A good title is the title of a successful book."
— Raymond Chandler

"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 (The Simple Art of Murder)

"There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you found about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
There is the soft and willing alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.
And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap d’Antibes, and Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying good night to his butler."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"California, the department store state."
— Raymond Chandler

"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

"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 of the tricks and has nothing to say."
— Raymond Chandler

"A really good detective never gets married."
— Raymond Chandler

"It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"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 (Playback)

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He 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—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."
— Raymond Chandler

""She gave me smile I could feel in my hip pocket.""
— Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely)

"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time."
— Raymond Chandler

"A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)"
— Raymond Chandler

"Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder."
— Raymond Chandler

"I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"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 (Pearls Are a Nuisance)

"I said: "Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish."
— Raymond Chandler (The Complete Stories)

"Velma you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes' the scram, white boy, jes' the scram."
— Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely)

"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. So we have to work with what we get."
— Raymond Chandler (The Lady in the Lake)

"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