Frases de Raymond Chandler

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“Não há armadilha mais mortal que a armadilha que você armou para si mesmo.”

“A coisa mais durável na escrita é estilo, e estilo é o investimento mais valioso que um escritor pode fazer com seu tempo.”

“Em tudo que chamamos de arte existe uma qualidade de redenção.”

“Quanto mais você raciocina, menos você cria.”

“Estou convencido de que não existe nenhum meio limpo de se conseguir 100 milhões de dólares.”

“Acabei de odiar você. Está tudo lavado fora de mim. Odeio muito as pessoas, mas não as odeio por muito tempo.”

“O cheiro do café era forte o suficiente para construir uma garagem.”

“Para a memória do Sr. Stan Phillips. (...) Apenas mais um lavador de quatro rodas.”

“Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.”

“The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov.”

“By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”