Wit & Attitude Quote by Roald Dahl

Call it a warning label disguised as a dare. Dahl frames writing as an act of voluntary stupidity, not because writers are untalented, but because the job is structurally irrational: unstable income, long solitude, constant rejection, and the slow, private terror that the next sentence won’t arrive. By leading with “fool,” he punctures the romantic myth of the author as chosen one. A writer isn’t crowned; a writer opts into a life that sensible people would avoid.

Then he swivels to the payoff: “absolute freedom.” The phrase is deliberately extreme, almost suspiciously pure. It’s not freedom in the corporate sense (flexible hours, working from home). It’s a wilder kind: the right to build worlds, to be disobedient, to tell the truth slant, to invent consequences and then refuse to apologize for them. Dahl, who made a career out of giving children stories that were gleefully cruel to cruel adults, knew that the page is one of the few places where you can break social rules without asking permission.

The subtext is that this freedom is both the compensation and the trap. Absolute freedom means no boss, but also no guardrails; no schedule, but also no alibi. The writer’s “payment” is autonomy so total it becomes a test of character. Dahl isn’t glamorizing the grind so much as clarifying the bargain: you trade comfort and certainty for the ability to say what you actually mean, in your own voice, on your own terms.