“It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”
Source: Wonder Boys
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Michael Chabon 96
Novelist, short story writer, essayist 1963Related quotes

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

"The Shadowland of Dreams"', published in Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (1996) by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Maida Rogerson, Martin Rutte and Tim Clauss; also in Alex Haley : The Man Who Traced America's Roots (2007), a collection of stories and essays by Haley published in Reader's Digest between 1954 to 1991.
Context: Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there’s a big difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.
Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 33 : dezmai of the drums, p. 294
The Visitor (2002)