““Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.””
![“Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote…” quote by Raymond Chandler](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/882/raymond-chandler-629_dashiel-hammett_hammett-was-the-ace-performer-he-is-said_20171.jpg)
![“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 a board fence and nobody looking.” quote by Raymond Chandler](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/614/raymond-chandler-629_writing_he-james-cain-is-every-kind-of-writer-i_41185.jpg)
