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

"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

"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)

""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)

"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)

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

"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)

"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)

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

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu: And Other Weird Stories)

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?"
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"Employers are like horses—they require management."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Summer Moonshine)

"Fond as he was of Pongo, Lord Ickenham could not see him as a breaker of hearts. Yet it appeared plain that his loss had left a large gap in this girl's life. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Never laugh at live dragons"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again)

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"'Where did you go to, if I may ask?' said Thorin to Gandalf as they rode along.
'To look ahead,' said he.
'And what brought you back in the nick of time?'
'Looking behind,' said he."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit)

"Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book."
— Philip José Farmer

"As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth."
— Philip José Farmer

"Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you."
— John Scalzi

"Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think if that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read."
— David McCullough

"Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love."
— David McCullough

"To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."
— David McCullough

"It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much."
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves)

"There's too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases-and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
— Robert E. Howard

"Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one's lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe."
— Robert E. Howard

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
— Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)

"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout"
— Robert A. Heinlein

"There is no such thing as "Just a cat.""
— Robert A. Heinlein

"The fellow is bereft and possibly violent."
— Jack Vance

"Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic."
— Jack Vance

"A strange abstract law that Pandelume termed 'Mathematics'."
— Jack Vance

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King