"I essentially write for myself"
About this Quote
"I essentially write for myself" reads like modesty, but it’s also a power move. Leon Uris made his name with big, crowd-moving historical novels - Exodus, Trinity - the kind of sweeping narrative machinery often treated as middlebrow entertainment by gatekeepers. By insisting the audience is, first, him, Uris sidesteps the most common trap for popular writers: performing sincerity to earn legitimacy. He’s saying the only standard that won’t wobble under fashion or criticism is internal.
The subtext is less solitary than it sounds. "For myself" doesn’t mean sealed off from readers; it means the reader he can actually see is the one at his desk. That’s a practical ethic. You can’t draft a scene for "the market" without inventing a committee in your head, and committees are allergic to risk. Uris’s best work depends on risk: bold moral framing, high emotion, clear villains and heroes, a conviction that history can be turned into narrative propulsion without apologizing for it.
Context matters because Uris wrote in an era when the "serious" novel was increasingly associated with interiority and ambiguity, while he leaned into plot, politics, and identity. His line becomes a preemptive defense against both critical condescension and audience expectation. Write to please everyone, and you end up writing to no one in particular. Write to satisfy the one person you can’t outrun, and the book has a chance to carry that certainty outward, like a signal strong enough to find its readers.
The subtext is less solitary than it sounds. "For myself" doesn’t mean sealed off from readers; it means the reader he can actually see is the one at his desk. That’s a practical ethic. You can’t draft a scene for "the market" without inventing a committee in your head, and committees are allergic to risk. Uris’s best work depends on risk: bold moral framing, high emotion, clear villains and heroes, a conviction that history can be turned into narrative propulsion without apologizing for it.
Context matters because Uris wrote in an era when the "serious" novel was increasingly associated with interiority and ambiguity, while he leaned into plot, politics, and identity. His line becomes a preemptive defense against both critical condescension and audience expectation. Write to please everyone, and you end up writing to no one in particular. Write to satisfy the one person you can’t outrun, and the book has a chance to carry that certainty outward, like a signal strong enough to find its readers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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