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

— Raymond Chandler

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Raymond Chandler

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

— Raymond Chandler

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

— Raymond Chandler

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.

— Raymond Chandler

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

— Raymond Chandler

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flat bush.

— Raymond Chandler

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 die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything.

— Raymond Chandler

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 for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.

— Raymond Chandler