Education Quote by Raymond Chandler

"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

About this Quote

Chandler is poking at the dirty secret of “craft”: it can professionalize the urge right out of you. Coming from a writer who turned genre mechanics into high style, the line lands as a self-aimed warning, not a romantic dismissal of technique. He’s talking about a specific corrosion. Each new tool - structure, pacing, clever reversals, the calibrated beat of a scene - can start to feel like a substitute for the original itch that made you write in the first place. The workshop brain steps in, the pulse recedes.

The subtext is fear of becoming a virtuoso with nothing at stake. “Tricks” is doing a lot of work here: it’s both affectionate and contemptuous, acknowledging how fiction is built from effects while hinting at the shame of relying on them. Chandler’s hardboiled universe is full of people selling surfaces - patter, scams, charm - and he’s implying writers can join that economy, laundering emptiness through competence. Mastery becomes a con.

Context matters: Chandler came late to fiction, after business collapse and depression-era reinvention, and he wrote within pulp constraints while aspiring to literary permanence. That tension sharpens the cynicism. He’s not arguing against learning; he’s arguing against mistaking fluency for meaning. The barb is aimed at the comfortable mid-career moment when you can execute on demand, hit the marks, deliver the product - and realize the product is all you’re delivering. The real craft, he implies, is protecting the raw nerve from the very skills that make it market-ready.

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Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was a Writer from USA.

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