Raymond Chandler Quotes

She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.

I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.

I wouldn't say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in lik...

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been...

The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something that they didn't have before. Maybe it did once, but not anymore....

I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to...

I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets.

If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it.Caterpillar blood, I said.

I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association fo...

Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case... He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down runni...

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 and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watchi...

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.

Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.

Marlowe's the name. The guy you've been trying to follow around for a couple of days.I ain't following anybody, doc.This jalopy is. Maybe you can't control it. Have it your own way. I'm now going to e...

I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective...

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

So you shoot people, she said quietly. You're a killer.Me? How?The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read.Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or bo...

I said: Dead end - quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this. Marlowe (talking about Olympia) in a short story called Goldfish.