fear of being misunderstood

If you’re self-obsessed enough, you’ll somehow just decide that everything everyone else is making is the same as what you’re doing. When I feel that way I’m like, “Nope, I’m not going to see any shows.”

Just seven years after the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she started writing military fiction under the name Robert Galbraith. She created her new persona because she was “yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career”. She wanted to “work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback.”

She

Conviction often stands in opposition to market trends. To have conviction before validation may make you seem weird or delusional, but it defines great artists—the ability to appreciate what others overlook or even fight against. To borrow YC parlance, they pursue “low-status things.” Maintaining this vision requires courage, especially when it

For authors like Joyce, Beckett, and Arno Schmidt, the model reader seems often to have been a conveniently unidentifiable version of themselves.