Quote of the Day

Garrison Keillor has a great essay in Salon.com about writers who whne and complain about how hard it is, about the agonies of the creative life. To which he replies:

Get a job. Try teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from September to June, and then tell us about suffering.

The fact of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks. They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa, or assembling parts in a factory.

Keillor's right. I don't think he's saying writing is easy...it's not. But it's easier, say, than working with hot tar on a sunny summer day in Florida. But today's quote doesn't come from the article, but rather from the comments section, in which writer Lev Raphael says:

I've always found writing to be a joyful, fulfilling, exciting experience--as good as sex with half the clean-up.

Heh.