Here’s the entire excerpt for today’s quote. I liked it so much I thought you might like to see it in full. The letter was quoted in Raymond Chandler Speaking.
May 25, 1957
To: Helga Greene
…To accept a mediocre form and make something like literature out of it is in itself rather an accomplishment. They tell me—I don’t say this on my own information—that hundreds of writers today are making some sort of living from the mystery story because I made it respectable and even dignified. But, hell, what else can you do when you write? You do the best you can in any medium. I was lucky, and it seems that my luck inspired others. Steinbeck and I agreed that we should like the writer who is to be remembered and honoured after we were gone to be some unknown, perhaps far better than either of us, who did not have the luck—or perhaps the drive. Any decent writer who thinks of himself occasionally as an artist would far rather be forgotten so that someone better might be remembered. We are not always nice people, but essentially we have an ideal that transcends ourselves…There are, of course, cheap and venal writers, but a real writer always at the bottom of his heart, when he runs across something good, makes a silent prayer that “this guy may be better than I am”. Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love. If you believe in an ideal, you don’t own it—it owns you, and you certainly don’t want to freeze it at your own level for mercenary reasons.
