Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandlerwas a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 July 1888
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
But nothing seems to do any good.
If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.
It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.
What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
Shake your business up and pour it. I don't have all day.
I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
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.
A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)