Raymond Chandler

There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.

If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

One would think a writer would be happy here — if a writer is ever happy anywhere.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar -- that's wonderful.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.