"If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's." In his youth he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat...[Artists] possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not poweful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and kowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks."
Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"
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