Raymond Chandler Quotes

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

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. […]

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

The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

If you believe in an ideal, you don’t own it, it owns you.

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

He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. […]

She (the cat) has been around me ever since I began to write, usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaping up against the typewriter and sometimes just quietly gazing out of the window from a corner of the desk, as much as to say, […]

She has another curious trick (which may or may not be rare) of never killing anything. She brings ’em back alive and lets you take them away from her… Mice bore her, but she catches them if they insist and then I have to kill them. She has a sort of tired interest in gophers, […]

When we have company she looks them over and decides almost instantly if she likes them. If she does she strolls over and plomps down on the floor just far away enough to make it a chore to pet her. If she doesn’t like them she sits in the middle of the living room, cast […]