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
If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.
A really good detective never gets married.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.