Raymond Chandler was not the happiest soul; something that you can tell all too well from his sardonic and deeply cynical novels.

He also was ever the outsider, too literary for the world of pulp crime, and too pulpy for the literary world (at least back then). So he lashed out at the “literary life” and what “repels” him about it:

…all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years.

He was bitter, to be sure, but also right. Something to keep in mind for those few of us who make it to a place where such worries are even a concern.