Aging & Wisdom Quote by Reynolds Price

The most revealing move here is the quiet downgrade from ambition to temperament: Price starts with the childhood myth of “artist” as painter, then pivots to a definition that feels less like a career choice than a diagnosis. “It turned out” signals the adult’s retrospective honesty, stripping away the romantic image of genius and replacing it with something plainer and more relentless: a person “very interested in watching the world.” That’s not a glamorous calling; it’s a habit, almost a compulsion.

The phrase “making copies of it” is deliberately provocative in a culture that prizes originality as the highest artistic virtue. Price is arguing, slyly, that art begins in fidelity. The copy isn’t counterfeit; it’s attention made legible. For a novelist, this is also a medium-jump confession: he didn’t abandon painting so much as translate it. The novelist becomes a painter of behavior, weather, family systems, the grain of a room. What matters is the stance toward reality: patient observation, then re-creation.

There’s subtext, too, about the moral stakes of looking. To “watch the world” is to refuse the comfort of abstraction; it’s to admit that people and places are specific, and specificity carries consequence. Price, a Southern writer formed amid tight social codes and historical pressure, suggests that copying is a way to keep faith with what you’ve actually seen, not what you wish were there. Art, in his framing, is less self-expression than disciplined witness.