Raymond Chandler

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.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

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.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

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.

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.