Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Morgan

There’s a blunt survival logic in Morgan’s line that sounds less like an artist’s manifesto than a field report from someone who’s seen what happens when the mind has nothing to grip. “I write as a way of keeping myself going” treats writing not as a gift or a calling, but as a load-bearing structure. The phrasing is practical, almost mechanical: keep going. Not transcend, not express, not “find my voice.” Endure.

The subtext is the soldier’s bargain with chaos. Military life trains you to accept systems that outlast you; writing becomes a parallel system, a routine you can carry into civilian time when orders stop and silence starts talking. “You build your life around writing” flips the usual fantasy. Writing isn’t something you fit into life after the real work is done. It is the architecture that prevents life from collapsing into drift, memory, or blunt aftermath.

Then he undercuts any romantic suffering with a sly pivot: “So it’s partly just curiosity to see what you can do.” Curiosity reads like modesty, but it’s also a disciplined form of hope. After war, grand ideals can feel like propaganda; curiosity is safer, sturdier, more honest. It implies craft, experiment, testable limits. Morgan makes writing sound like training: you show up, you see what holds, you push a little farther. The intent isn’t to mythologize the writer. It’s to explain how a person keeps moving when the world has already proven it can break you.