Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler swings a knife at the priesthood of critics, and he does it with the cool impatience of a man who made his living turning feeling into sentences. Calling most criticism “drivel” is less a tantrum than a preemptive strike: he’s refusing to let the ledger-keepers tell him what his work is “about.” The jab that “half of it is dishonest” lands because it names criticism’s dirty secret - the incentives. Reviews don’t just measure art; they perform status, settle scores, audition for cleverness. Dishonesty isn’t always malice. It’s the way a critic can’t help writing toward a clique, a trend, an editor’s angle, a career.

“Shortcut to oblivion” is Chandler’s bleakest, funniest line. He’s not claiming critics are powerful; he’s saying the opposite. Criticism is parasitic and perishable, tied to the moment’s quarrels. The novel endures; the take gets composted. Coming from a noir writer often patronized as “genre,” that’s also self-defense. If you’ve been treated as pulp, you learn how quickly gatekeepers vanish.

The final sentence is the real thesis: an argument for sensation over abstraction. Chandler isn’t anti-intellectual; he’s anti-idea as a bludgeon. “Thinking in terms of ideas” becomes a kind of anesthesia, a way to replace the lived texture of fear, desire, loneliness with tidy themes. Noir works because it’s mood engineering. Chandler is warning that when you translate art too quickly into concepts, you may prove you’re smart while demonstrating you didn’t feel it.