Raymond Chandler Quotes
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. Alfred A. Knopf, 1939, p. 11.
Unfortunately, drinking has been the scourge of Russia over the years. With one of the highest alcoholism rates in the world, Russia’s average lifespan has always been shortened by alcohol.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. The Congressmen who voted for Prohibition in the next century had not read or believed this quotation of Twain’s.
There was no Federal regulation of food and drink then. Fast buck whisky purveyors would include all kinds of ingredients and processes, safe and sanitary or not. Many Americans died or became very sick from eating tainted food then. Even bad whisky had killed many. TR chose whisky as his example, because Congress was filled with heavy drinkers and whisky was then the favorite Congressional drink. Roosevelt, with these tactics got the first federal food regulatory laws passed over enourmous opposition, not unlike the fight over Obamacare which would take place a century later.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
