Raymond Chandler

• "The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men."
  • The Big Sleep, chapter 2. (1939)

• "A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock."
  • The Big Sleep, chapter 2. (1939)

• "The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head."
  • The Big Sleep, chapter 2. (1939)

• "He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus.
  "I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor."
  • "Pearls are a Nuisance" (short story, 1939)

• "Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
  • Farewell, My Lovely, chapter 1. (1940)

• "He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of."
  • Farewell, My Lovely, chapter 2. (1940)

• "'They say money don't stink,' he said. 'I sometimes wonder.'"
  • Farewell, My Lovely, chapter 34. (1940)

• "She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones."
  • The High Window, chapter 2. (1942)

• "He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in."
  • The High Window, chapter 3. (1942)

• "The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens."
  • The Lady in the Lake, chapter 1. (1943)

• "I hung up.
  It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk."
  • The Little Sister, chapter 1. (1949)

• "You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off."
  • Playback, chapter 14. (1958)

• "Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that."
  • "The Simple Art of Murder" (essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly November 1945)

• "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."
  • "The Simple Art of Murder" (essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly November 1945)

• "Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."
  • Introduction to The Simple Art of Murder (short story collection, 1950)

• "The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to."
  • Introduction to The Simple Art of Murder (short story collection, 1950)

• "There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel."
  • Introduction to The Simple Art of Murder (short story collection, 1950)

• "Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married."
  • "Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949) (first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962)

• "There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success."
  • letter, 22 April 1949 (published in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962)

• "The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective."
  • letter, 19 April 1951 (published in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962)

• "The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing."
  • "Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story" (published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler, 1976)

Attributed

• "At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable."

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