War & Peace Quote by Robert Sheckley

Writing, in Sheckley’s telling, is less a muse-kissed calling than a job you keep returning to even when you hate the shift. The line’s sly power comes from how it refuses the romantic myth without turning the complaint into melodrama. “Not too fond” is a deliberately underheated phrase for something many writers experience as psychic trench warfare. That understatement is a classic Sheckley move: the wry shrug that masks an unglamorous truth, delivered with enough deadpan to make it land.

The subtext is a quiet demystification of “talent.” Self-doubt isn’t framed as a personal defect or a sign you’re doing it wrong; it’s treated as routine weather. “Constant battle” suggests writing is adversarial, but the opponent isn’t the market, critics, or technology. It’s you. The real conflict is internal discipline versus internal sabotage, and Sheckley admits he doesn’t win by feeling inspired; he wins by showing up.

“Part of the territory” does even more cultural work. It’s frontier language, a nod to genre and craft: science fiction as exploration, writing as a landscape with predictable hazards. Sheckley, a satirical SF author who made his name turning big ideas into sharp parables, frames doubt as a cost of entry, not a tragic identity. The intent isn’t to martyr the writer; it’s to normalize the grind while keeping a comedian’s eye on the absurdity of choosing it. The joke, gently aimed, is that the territory keeps claiming new settlers anyway.