Her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing…

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back…

— Raymond Chandler

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

— 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…

— Raymond Chandler

“Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key]…

— Raymond Chandler

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

— Raymond Chandler

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

— Raymond Chandler

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

— Raymond Chandler

“He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and…

— Raymond Chandler

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

— Raymond Chandler

“I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn't want to sit down. He just…

— Raymond Chandler

“A three-piece Mexican band was making the kind of music a Mexican band always makes. Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They…

— Raymond Chandler

Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.

— Raymond Chandler

“The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate…

— 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…

— Raymond Chandler

“The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind…

— Raymond Chandler