Lisa Schmeiser

“Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959

“Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had”
― Raymond Chandler

“It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.”
― Raymond Chandler "The Big Sleep"

“The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment."

(A Qualified Farewell)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler; and English Summer: A Gothic Romance