You can't tell a doper well under control from a vegetarian book-keeper. — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public… — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over… — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant… — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a… — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
“The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library… — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get… — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley. — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. — Raymond Chandler Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image