"I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one"
About this Quote
Pinkwater kicks the door in with a double provocation: he admits the childish machismo of dismissing writing as a "sissy occupation", then refuses to take it back. The comic whiplash is the point. By saying "It is", he parodies the old gendered contempt rather than endorsing it, using the slur as a fossil from the culture he grew up in - a time when brains and sensitivity were coded as suspect, and real work meant calluses. The joke is that he still hears that voice, and he lets it talk long enough for us to recognize how absurd it sounds.
Then he pivots to a different kind of heresy: "To this day, I find it terribly easy". In a literary world that often mythologizes struggle - the tortured artist, the agonizing blank page - Pinkwater offers cheerfully unglamorous competence. It's not bravado so much as demystification. Writing, for him, isn't a sacred ordeal; it's a practical skill he happens to have, like whistling or fixing a leaky faucet. That stance quietly deflates the prestige economy around authorship, where difficulty is treated as proof of seriousness.
The final line lands like a shrug with teeth: instead of "hunt[ing] up a text", he "just wrote one". It's a credo for making culture rather than curating it, and it hints at his wider sensibility as a comic novelist: impatience with gatekeepers, affection for the direct route, and a willingness to puncture his own persona. The subtext is almost punk: if you can do the thing, do it - and don't let other people's ideas of masculinity, artistry, or legitimacy decide what counts as work.
Then he pivots to a different kind of heresy: "To this day, I find it terribly easy". In a literary world that often mythologizes struggle - the tortured artist, the agonizing blank page - Pinkwater offers cheerfully unglamorous competence. It's not bravado so much as demystification. Writing, for him, isn't a sacred ordeal; it's a practical skill he happens to have, like whistling or fixing a leaky faucet. That stance quietly deflates the prestige economy around authorship, where difficulty is treated as proof of seriousness.
The final line lands like a shrug with teeth: instead of "hunt[ing] up a text", he "just wrote one". It's a credo for making culture rather than curating it, and it hints at his wider sensibility as a comic novelist: impatience with gatekeepers, affection for the direct route, and a willingness to puncture his own persona. The subtext is almost punk: if you can do the thing, do it - and don't let other people's ideas of masculinity, artistry, or legitimacy decide what counts as work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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