Daily Inspiration Quote by John Irving

Thick skin is the unglamorous job requirement Irving smuggles into a line that sounds like casual advice. He’s not praising toughness as a personality trait so much as naming the price of admission to any public-facing art: you will be misunderstood, dismissed, reviewed by people who skim, and occasionally reduced to a headline-sized caricature of your own work.

The repetition does the heavy lifting. By saying “thick skin” twice, Irving turns resilience from a nice-to-have into a structural necessity, like learning dialogue or mastering a sentence. The phrase “this business” is doing quiet, cynical work too. It frames literature and acting as industries, not sanctuaries, where gatekeepers, markets, and tastes exert pressure. That’s a novelist speaking with the pragmatism of someone who’s lived through publicity cycles, adaptation chatter, and the weird afterlife of a book once it leaves the author’s desk.

There’s subtext in the pairing of “actor or a writer.” Irving is a novelist, but he’s also long been entangled with cinema culture through adaptations of his work. He’s pointing to a shared ecosystem: performance and prose are different crafts, but both are evaluated in public, often brutally, and often with a confidence that outpaces comprehension. The conditional “if you’re going to be” lands like a warning: the world won’t adjust to your sensitivity; your sensitivity has to learn to survive the world.

Intent-wise, it’s less a pep talk than a boundary. Make the work, take the hits, keep going.