From Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

"Nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool." 

"I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.”

“The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.”

“You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.”

“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.”