The Big Sleep and Other Novels Quotes

“His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face.
‘What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?’
‘There are ladies present.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honourable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial use of propaganda.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. 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.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“I went out to the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life-blood of tired men.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office for ever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition – hard, tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law ever was ever intended to be.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“There”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen, and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortcha-koff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armour, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“I walked along to the double doors and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels