Art & Creativity Quote by Anita Diament

Diament’s advice lands with the calm authority of someone who’s survived the apprenticeship phase and remembers exactly how bruising it can be. The triple-beat of “reading, reading, reading” isn’t just emphasis; it’s a corrective to the romantic myth that writing is primarily about inspiration. She’s smuggling in a more pragmatic truth: voice is built by exposure, not isolation. “Widely and deeply” widens the aperture further, pushing against the algorithmic habit of staying inside one genre tribe. Craft comes from cross-pollination - the novelist who reads history, the memoirist who studies poetry, the genre writer who borrows structure from classics.

The middle sentence shifts from practice to endurance, and that’s where the subtext gets sharper. “Rejection letters” are named plainly, without euphemism, because Diament is normalizing the indignity as part of the job description. She’s not offering a hustle mantra; she’s offering inoculation. If you expect rejection, you’re less likely to interpret it as a verdict on your worth, and more likely to keep producing work until chance and timing finally line up.

“Only write what you love” is the softest line and the hardest. In a market that rewards trend-chasing, it argues that longevity depends on attachment, not strategy. Love becomes a practical fuel source, the thing that outlasts bad drafts, indifferent gatekeepers, and the long, quiet stretches where no one is clapping. Coming from a working novelist, it’s less idealism than survival advice: affection for the work is the only motive that reliably survives the industry’s indifference.