"My friend back in the day claimed that he wanted to be a writer with all his heart, but it turns out he didn’t want to eat the shit sandwich that comes along with that pursuit. He loved writing, sure, but he didn’t love it enough to endure the ignominy of not getting the results he wanted, when he wanted them. He didn’t want to work so hard at anything unless he was guaranteed some measure of worldly success on his own terms. Which means, I think, that he only wanted to be a writer with half his heart. And yeah, soon enough, he quit. Which left me hungrily eyeballing his half-eaten shit sandwich, wanting to ask, “Are you gonna finish that?” Because that’s how much I loved the work: I would even eat somebody else’s shit sandwich if it meant that I got to spend more time writing."
-- Elizabeth Gilbert
No comments:
Post a Comment