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Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler Quotes

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Famous Raymond Chandler Quotes

“The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.”

HeartLongStoriesLiteratureBornDecisionLonelinessAuthorityJudgmentPerfectionEssenceSeriesDefinitionsImpulseCommitteesConferencesArbitrarySycophants
Book:Raymond Chandler Speaking
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“So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”

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Book:Raymond Chandler Speaking
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“You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.”

GivingLongStillsSometimesProblemFacesHouseFunWaitingWalksRoomsGriefRichPiecesDoorsMonthsShotsRingsJailOccupationSensibleLoadBeatenShakingGet RichSmall PiecesWaiting RoomsNew FacesBuzzers
Book:The Long Goodbye: A Novel
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“Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood”

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Author:Raymond Chandler
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“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

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Book:Raymond Chandler Speaking
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