Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandlerwas a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 July 1888
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.
They write them long because they can't write them short.
Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
All reading for pleasure is entertainment.
It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.
Some days I feel like playing it smooth. Some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.
I certainly admire people who do things.
I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.