Time & Perspective Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler is needling the fantasy of private writing: the idea that you can confess onto paper and remain unobserved. His point is psychological, not logistical. The instant thought becomes text, it stops being a fleeting internal mess and turns into something with an audience baked in, even if that audience is only your future self. “However secretly” is the knife twist; secrecy doesn’t cancel performance, it sharpens it. You choose words, you arrange facts, you edit your own motives into something that sounds coherent. That’s publication in miniature: the self staging itself for judgment.

The line also carries Chandler’s hard-boiled suspicion of innocence. In his world, everyone is angling for a story that makes them look better than they are, and writing is just a more elegant hustle. Put it on paper and you’ve already started managing the record. It’s why diaries read like alibis and why “notes to self” turn into little speeches.

Context matters: Chandler wrote in an era when print culture was a gatekept machine and the author’s name was a public identity, not a casual handle. He knew how quickly text detaches from its maker and circulates. Read now, it lands as an eerie premonition of the internet brain: we draft as if someone might quote-tweet us later. Chandler’s warning isn’t “don’t write.” It’s “don’t pretend the page is neutral.” The page is a stage, and the pen already knows where the spotlight is.