I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all. Alice Munro
About This Quote

The quote, “I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30,â€� is from Jeanette Winterson's essay 'The Art of Fiction'. In this essay, she comments on her early struggles as a writer. She says that as a young girl she longed to be a novelist but could not understand why so many people had written novels. She thought it must be something you were born with because she could not imagine how anyone could have started writing.

She was so focused on being a novelist that she forgot all about it for a while. Then, age 20-30 proved difficult for her. She had lost motivation and felt that she was not good enough to write anything.

It took her many years of hard work to overcome this hurdle.

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  1. It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.
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