The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.
Raymond ChandlerTag: life death-and-dying beautiful goodbyes
Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?"
"It takes about three years."
"Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.
On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.
Raymond ChandlerI don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.
Raymond ChandlerTag: humor manners hard-boiled put-downs raymond-chandler philip-marlowe
Authenticity is boring, credibility is important
Raymond ChandlerA three-piece Mexican band was making the kind of music a Mexican band always makes. Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels an a drawn-out, sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazon, a lady who is "linda" but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair and when he isn't making with the love stuff he looks as if his knife work in an alley would be efficient and economical.
Raymond ChandlerIt is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
Raymond ChandlerThe voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.
Raymond ChandlerThe private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective."
(Letter, April 19, 1951)
Tag: writing mysteries realism private-detective
The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment."
(A Qualified Farewell)
Tag: writing insight craft critics detachment
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