Terminal Rex
Going Indognito mode..
Raymond Chandler is considered one of the best writers in American History and several of his books were Adapted into the Greatest Film noir Movies ever made. He was famous for his ability to convey great atmosphere with minimal effort and sharp snappy dialogue so good they made no changed to it when that adapted it Into movie scripts. His most famous creation was Hard boiled Detective Philip Marlowe. I'm reading several of his books now.
Here's some of Chandler quotes on the subject of writing.
“Writers … have to fight the impulse to live up to someone else’s idea of what they are.”
"_*That you should have pride in your purer American heritage of language seems to me a slight thing. Latin became corrupt, but French is a sharper language than Latin ever was. The best writing in English today is done by Americans, but not in any purist tradition. They have roughed the language around as Shakespeare did and done it the violence of melodrama and the press box. They have knocked over tombs and sneered at the dead. Which is as it should be. There are too many dead men and there is too much talk about them._*"
"_*If I hadn’t grown up on Latin and Greek, I doubt if I would know so well how to draw the very subtle line between what I call a vernacular style and what I should call an illiterate or faux naif style. There’s a hell of a lot of difference, to my mind._*"
"_*I can’t seem to get started on doing anything. Always very tough for me to get started. The more things people say about you the more you feel as if you were writing in an examination room, that it didn’t belong to you any more, that you had to protect critical reputations and not let them down. Writers even as cynical as I have to fight the impulse to live up to someone else’s idea of what they are._*"
"_*I am having a hard time with the book. Have enough paper written to make it complete, but must do all over again. I just didn’t know where I was going and when I got there I saw that I had come to the wrong place. that’s the hell of being the kind of writer who cannot plan anything, but has to make it up as he goes along and then try to make sense out of it. If you gave me the best plot in the world all worked out I could not write it. It would be dead for me._*"
"_*I am the same man I was when I was a struggling nobody. I feel the same. I know more, it is true, break all the rules and get away with it, but that doesn’t make me important. I may have written the most beautiful American vernacular that has ever been written (some people think I have), but if it is so, I am still a writer trying to find his way through a maze. Should I be anything else? I can’t see it._*:
"_*And here I am at 2:30 A.M. writing about technique, in spite of a strong conviction that the moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas._*"
"_*I have never made any money on writing. I work too slowly, throw away too much, and what I write that sells is not at all the sort of thing I really want to write._*"
"_*I never really had a great urge to write fiction, which is becoming more and more of a pseudo-art. … But you guys have an obligation … to avoid pompously bad writing and the kind of dullness that comes from letting flatulent asses pontificate about things they know no more about than the next man, if as much. There is a (to me) shocking example of this in the November Harper’s, called “Salute to the Litterateurs.” Consider:_*"
“For writers are people of peculiar sensitivity to the winds of doctrine which blow with especial violence in a time of rapid change — some more so than others, but none, except the outright hacks, completely immune.”
I regard that sentence as a disgrace to English prose. It says nothing and says it ponderously, in a cliched manner, and without syntax.
[…]
Is there anything said here that could not be said better with a simple after-dinner belch?
"_*I probably know as much about the essential qualities of good writing as anybody now discussing it. I do not discuss these things professionally for the simple reason that I do not consider it worthwhile. I am not interested in pleasing the intellectuals by writing literary criticism, because literary criticism as an art has in these days too narrow a scope and too limited a public, just as has poetry. I do not believe it is a writer’s function to talk to a dead generation of leisured people who once had time to relish the niceties of critical thought. …. The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called “significant literature” will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods that are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and Automobiles_*"
"_I never really had a great urge to write fiction, which is becoming more and more of a pseudo-art. … But you guys have an obligation … to avoid pompously bad writing and the kind of dullness that comes from letting flatulent asses pontificate about things they know no more about than the next man, if as much. There is a (to me) shocking example of this in the November Harper’s, called “Salute to the Litterateurs.” Consider:_
“*For writers are people of peculiar sensitivity to the winds of doctrine which blow with especial violence in a time of rapid change — some more so than others, but none, except the outright hacks, completely immune.*”
_I regard that sentence as a disgrace to English prose. It says nothing and says it ponderously, in a cliched manner, and without syntax._
[…]
_Is there anything said here that could not be said better with a simple after-dinner belch?_
"
"_*My theory has always been that the public will accept style provided you do not call it style either in words or by, as it were, standing off and admiring it. There seems to me to be a vast difference between writing down to the public (something which always flops in the end) and doing what you want to do in a form which the public has learned to accept._*"
"_*There is not much point in all this pseudo-elaborate differentiation between the professional and the amateur. No such difference exists, or ever did._
*
[…]
_
*All this talk about “pros” is itself sheer amateurism. There is no such thing as professionalism in writing._*"
I desperately want there to be Philip Marlowe videogame. Maybe there was an old moon and click somewhere. As you can tell from the lengthy of this comment I get enthusiastic when it comes to Raymon Chandler.
Here's some of Chandler quotes on the subject of writing.
“Writers … have to fight the impulse to live up to someone else’s idea of what they are.”
"
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"
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“For writers are people of peculiar sensitivity to the winds of doctrine which blow with especial violence in a time of rapid change — some more so than others, but none, except the outright hacks, completely immune.”
I regard that sentence as a disgrace to English prose. It says nothing and says it ponderously, in a cliched manner, and without syntax.
[…]
Is there anything said here that could not be said better with a simple after-dinner belch?
"
"_I
“*For writers are people of peculiar sensitivity to the winds of doctrine which blow with especial violence in a time of rapid change — some more so than others, but none, except the outright hacks, completely immune.*”
_I regard that sentence as a disgrace to English prose. It says nothing and says it ponderously, in a cliched manner, and without syntax._
[…]
_Is there anything said here that could not be said better with a simple after-dinner belch?_
"
"_
"
[…]
_
*All this talk about “pros” is itself sheer amateurism. There is no such thing as professionalism in writing.
I desperately want there to be Philip Marlowe videogame. Maybe there was an old moon and click somewhere. As you can tell from the lengthy of this comment I get enthusiastic when it comes to Raymon Chandler.