I come from a class and section of American life which regarded writing - the profession of a writer - as something very mysterious and romantic and very remote from its own life and the world of its own knowledge and experience. For this reason, as I have said, it was twenty-six years or more before I even dared to admit concretely that I might become a writer and I was almost thirty before my own admission was concretely affirmed by publication. For this reason, perhaps, and for others - which I tried to mention - a kind of tremendous intertia in me and the tendency of human kind to put off and evade for as long as possible the thing it knows it has to do, the work it cannot avoid and without which its life is nothing - and a strong sense of direction and often a very confused sense of purpose. And yet it has seemed to me that in all these apparent handicaps, there may have been certain advantages, too. The belief that I may be by nature somewhat indolent and the knowledge that I may allow a ravenous curiosity for life and new experience to come before the work I ought to be doing - and the fact that as hard and grim as work itself may be, not only the intensity of effort and concentration required, but the period of spiritual imprisonment that work necessitates - the very knowledge that once a piece of work has been begun, a man's whole life must be absorbed and obsessed by it day and night until he finishes it - all of these things, together with a certain goad of conscience, have driven me to face the fact of work, to try to meet it squarely and to do it as hard as I can once I am started on it. It has been said of much that I have written thus far that it was autobiographical. I cannot answer such a very debatable and complicated word in the short space allotted here and I shall not attempt to. I can only say that it seems to me that every creative act is in one way or another - autobiographical.
I am not sure that it is known what a naked, fiercely lacerated thing my spirit was [during the first years following Look Homeward, Angel's publication], how I have writhed beneath the lies and injuries and at times, almost maddened to insanity at the treachery, the injustice and the hatred I have had to experience and endure, at what a frightful cost I have attained even the little fortitude I have attained.
Restraint, discipline - yes, they were needed desperately, they are needed badly still. But let us not get the issues confused, let us not again get into the old confusion between substance and technique, purpose and manner, direction and means, the spirit and the letter. Restrain my adjectives, by all means, discipline my adverbs, moderate the technical extravagances of my incondite experience, but don't derail the train, don't take the Pacific Limited and switch it down the siding towards Hogwart Junction. It can't be done. I'm not going to let it happen. If you expected me to grow conservative simply because I got bald and fat and for the first time in my life had a few dollars in the bank, you are going to be greivously mistaken.
