Raymond Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, he became a writer after losing his job as an oil company executive. He had a huge influence on American popular culture as well as genre literature, and was a founder of the modern strain of detective fiction, as personified in his protagonist Philip Marlowe. All but one of his novels was made into films.
“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”
“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.”
“The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.”
“Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.”
“The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.”
“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.”
“The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.”
“There is no such thing as perfect punctuation, because punctuation is an art and not a science.”
“The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.”