Raymond Chandler

[ Credo of fictional detective Philip Marlowe :] Trouble Is My Business.

You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

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

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? . . . You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

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

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

California, the department store state.

Alcohol is like love: the first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that, you just take the girl’s clothes off.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.

You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone else’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.

My experience with trying to help people to write has been limited but extremely intensive. I have done everything from giving would-be writers money to live on to plotting and rewriting their stories for them, and so far I have found it all to be a waste. The people whom God or nature intended to be writers find their own answers, and those who have to ask are impossible to help. They are merely people who want to be writers.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas.

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss a work in progress. Never answer a critic.

If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts, you can also get by, after a fashion again, without talent. But you certainly can’t get by without either .

Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash.

I am convinced as a member of the reading public that bad [author] photographs are bad business. I have been put off reading books, which otherwise looked rather attractive, by the puss of the author printed on the back of the dust cover.

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.