"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
— James Joyce

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. "
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
— James Joyce

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
— James Joyce

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery."
— James Joyce

"My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions."
— James Joyce

"Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory."
— James Joyce (The Dead)

"One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Shut your eyes and see."
— James Joyce

"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

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

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

"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)

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

"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)

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

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

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

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

"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)

"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)

" 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

"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

"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 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)

"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

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

"...had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come."
— Raymond Chandler

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

"There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that."
— Raymond Chandler (Pearls Are a Nuisance)

"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)

"The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two."
— Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man)

"You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me."
— Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest)

"He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan."
— Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon)

"We didn't exactly believe your story, Miss O'Shaughnessy, we believed your 200 dollars. I mean you paid us more than if you had been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it alright. (Sam Spade)"
— Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon)

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them."
— William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."
— William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)