Nate

“The other night I thought, what a rich yet damn panicky experience it must be for writers to see strangers read what they've written. Then I thought, in a hell of a daily economic struggle to pay rent and eat and stay afloat in a money-worshipping world that wouldn't give men of non-conforming spirit and dreams the right time of day, what a rough tough lonely job serious writers have. To make points, to make ideas stick in hope of re-routing minds, to go all-out for tries to change a world with just pens, they've got to just about rape people with words. Same time it seems to me too many writers write as if they were committing acts of espionage. When reading their work, it always seems they've spied on and stole some great writer's state secrets. I think a writer should be enslaved to no dead or living writing god. He should create strictly from his own personality. His signature should be so deeply his own. If he should fail in this, the fault would be his, never that of the god. If he should succeed, this success would be all his own, his victory, and the victory would be all the greater and sweeter because of it.”
― Alan Kapelner, All the Naked Heroes: A Novel of the Thirties