Raymond Chandler
American short-story writer, screenwriter, and novelist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film-making. It's not what films are for.
—Raymond Chandler, American short-story writer, screenwriter, and novelist, 1951
Posted on May 6, 1998 at 9:14 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962
Posted on March 9, 1999 at 11:22 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1947
Posted on July 18, 2002 at 6:12 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962
Posted on June 5, 2002 at 6:48 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The 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.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962
Posted on September 18, 2002 at 7:33 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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 passé before it gets into print.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking
Posted on July 8, 2003 at 7:28 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking
Posted on May 21, 2003 at 11:38 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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
Posted on March 24, 2003 at 7:44 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.
—Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking
Posted on June 28, 2001 at 3:55 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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, Raymond Chandler Speaking
Posted on March 1, 2001 at 9:32 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
—Raymond Chandler, A letter to Atlantic Monthly editor Edward Weeks
Posted on March 14, 2002 at 11:09 PM
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