You cannot have art without a public taste and you cannot have a
public taste without a sense of style and quality throughout the
social structure. Curiously enough this sense of style seems to
have very little to do with refinement or even with humanity. It
can exist in a savage and dirty age, but it cannot exist in the age
of Milton Berle, Mary Margaret McBride, the Book of the Month Club,
the Hearst Press, and the Coca-Cola machine.
-- Raymond Chandler. Selected Letters. (181)
You can't write just because you have read all the books.
-- Raymond Chandler. Selected Letters. (181)
When I started out to write fiction I had the great disadvantage
of having absolutely no talent for it. I couldn't get characters
in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more
than two people were on a scene I couldn't keep one of them
alive.
-- Raymond Chandler. Selected Letters. (187)
[of film writing]: "And the best short scene I ever wrote, by
my own judgement, was one in which a girl said "uh-huh" three
times with three different intonations, and that's all there was
to it."
-- Raymond Chandler. Selected Letters. (298)
Good writers write what
they want and make the reader like it.
-- Raymond Chandler. Selected Letters. (1981) p.473