Success Quote by Fred Saberhagen

There’s a quiet deflation of the romantic myth in Saberhagen’s line: no grand manifesto, no talk of changing literature, just the sober ambition to stay in the chair and pay rent. Coming from a working science-fiction novelist - a field long treated as both commercial and culturally sidelined - the sentence reads like a small act of honesty. The “chief professional goal” isn’t fame or legacy; it’s continuity. He frames authorship less as inspiration than as employment, a craft with bills attached.

The phrase “at this stage” does a lot of work. It implies an earlier phase when the goals were bigger, shinier, maybe naive: awards, breakthroughs, validation from gatekeepers. Now the wish is durability. That’s not resignation so much as an experienced recalibration, the kind you hear from anyone who’s watched trends churn, publishers fold, and attention move on. “Simply” is the sly modifier: it pretends the goal is modest while hinting how hard it actually is. To keep writing is to keep producing under pressure; to make a living is to convince the market - repeatedly - that your sentences still deserve space.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense of professional pride. Saberhagen refuses the purity test that says real art should ignore money. He’s staking a claim for the midlist writer’s life: not glamorous, not tragic, just persistent. In an industry that fetishizes either superstardom or suffering, his understated aim lands as a corrective. The success he’s naming is survival.