The New Year Quote by C. S. Forester

The line reads like a private vow made in public: a novelist deciding that the only audience worth fearing is himself. Forester isn’t merely posturing against “editors or publishers”; he’s identifying the quiet, corrosive way the market colonizes the mind. The real target is anticipatory obedience, that internalized editor who starts trimming sentences before they exist. By naming tastes and ideals as the only compass, he frames writing not as content production but as an aesthetic ethic: a discipline of refusal.

The construction matters. “Resolution” suggests something stern and continuous, not a burst of inspiration. “Never write a word I did not want to write” is deliberately absolute, the kind of total language you use when you know compromise arrives in small, reasonable increments. He’s drawing a hard border because he’s speaking from experience: the literary economy doesn’t usually demand you sell out all at once; it asks you to sand down the oddness, explain the difficult bit, add the more “relatable” scene.

Forester’s career context sharpens the stakes. Writing in the early-to-mid 20th century, he worked inside popular forms (adventure, naval fiction) that were heavily mediated by publishing expectations. That he became widely read while professing indifference to gatekeepers adds a sly secondary message: autonomy isn’t the opposite of craft or success; it’s often the precondition for a voice that can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s. The subtext is a warning and a dare: if you’re always writing for approval, you’ll eventually lose track of what you actually like.