5 Raymond Chandler Quotes on Art

Raymond Chandler quotes on art

5. There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

7. The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

9. 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.

27. Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

32. There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other... the truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.