Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Chandler

Compression is Chandler's real thriller: the suspense of what you can afford not to say. In that one sentence he maps screenwriting as a paradoxical craft, where the work is measured less by what lands on the page than by what disappears from it. "Say much in little" is already a demand for density, but Chandler immediately tightens the vise: take half of that little out. The joke is dry, but the cynicism is practical. Hollywood doesn't reward literary sprawl; it rewards velocity, legibility, and the illusion that nothing is being strained for.

The key tell is "still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement". Chandler, a novelist famous for ornate similes and hard-boiled voice, is admitting the industry's central trick: writing that looks unforced is usually the most engineered. The subtext is almost a complaint - that screenwriting is forced to smuggle meaning under the cover of ease, to make structure feel like happenstance and subtext feel like air. It's a craft of negative space, where character is revealed by omissions, interruptions, and what isn't spelled out because an actor, a cut, or a glance can carry it.

Context sharpens the bite. Chandler came to film in the 1940s, writing on deadlines inside a studio system that treated scripts as blueprints to be revised by committee. His line reads like a war story from a novelist learning that in movies, "literary" isn't a compliment. The intent isn't to romanticize restraint; it's to warn you that the camera will expose every extra syllable, and the audience will feel the effort the moment you stop hiding it.