 |
Film / Filmmaking / Movies
|
|
The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Heroes/Heroism
|
|
|
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Hollywood
|
|
|
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
Its idea of production value is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Justice
|
|
|
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.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Language
|
|
|
It 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 Chandler
|
|
|
I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be pass? before it gets into print.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Law
|
|
|
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Legacy
|
|
|
There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Money
|
|
|
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Murder
|
|
|
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Poetry
|
|
|
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Prison
|
|
|
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism. All this stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating against the bars, running spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs -- all that is for the big house. A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world. Life in jail is in suspension.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Public
|
|
|
The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Reading
|
|
|
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
A good title is the title of a successful book.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Reason
|
|
|
The more you reason the less you create.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Science
|
|
|
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Smile
|
|
|
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
Storytelling
|
|
|
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
-Raymond Chandler
|
Books by and about Raymond Chandler