Education Quote by Russell Banks

Banks opens with a small act of cruelty: he measures the romance of “choosing to be a writer” against the blunt arithmetic of the dentist’s office. It’s funny in the way a hard truth is funny, because the comparison is deliberately unglamorous. Not hedge-fund managers or celebrities, but the steady, respectable middle class of accountants and dentists - people whose labor is valued in a way that doesn’t depend on cultural taste, luck, or a fickle market.

The intent is less to discourage writing than to strip it of its sentimental alibi. If you “choose” this life, Banks implies, you’re also choosing structural precarity: the long odds, the delayed payoffs, the fact that the work’s social prestige often outruns its actual wages. The subtext is about American mythology. We tell ourselves that talent plus effort equals a living; Banks reminds you that writing is an art form stapled to an industry, and the industry doesn’t owe you fairness. Merit may shape the page, but it doesn’t set the royalty rate.

Context matters: Banks came up in a literary economy where the cultural importance of fiction could be high while the financial rewards stayed narrow. By invoking dentists and accountants, he’s also puncturing the writer’s favorite vanity - that suffering is proof of seriousness. No, he suggests; suffering is often just the job’s default setting. The line lands because it refuses the writer-as-martyr pose and replaces it with a practical, almost parental warning: aspiration is real, but so is rent.