Alcohol is like love, he said. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite cha...
The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamp, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum - all this i...
Tengo una guerra en marcha con la Warner. Tengo una guerra en marcha con el jardinero. Tengo una guerra en marcha con un hombre que vino a arreglar el tocadiscos y arruinó dos discos LP. Tengo varias...
Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else.
It could have been a beautiful friendship, Beifus said with a sigh. Except for the ice pick, of course.
I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I...
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men. It
I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. There was a gusty wind blowing in at the windows and the soot from the oil burners of the hotel next doo...
I walked along to the double doors and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.
I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there’s one thing you can be sure of—you’re a late comer to the show.
However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.
Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of cor...
Her hair by daylight was pure auburn and on it she wore a hat with a crown the size of a whiskey glass and a brim you could have wrapped the week’s laundry in. She wore it at an angle of approximately...
He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind...
Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know. Raymond Chandler
Carta a James Sandoe, 14 de octubre de 1949.Ahora estoy leyendo So little time, de Marquand. Recuerdo, o creo recordar, que fue bastante maltratada cuando apareció, pero a mí me parece llena de ingeni...
California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.
You were lucky about that gun. All the people we know have been playing with it, wiping prints off and putting them on. I even put a set on myself just to be fashionable.
Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brill...