Time & Perspective Quote by R. A. Salvatore

Salvatore’s line lands like a confession from inside the machine: school didn’t just fail to cultivate a writer; it trained him to treat reading and writing as transactions. The repetition of “in order to get the grade” is the point. It’s not poetic flourish so much as an auditory treadmill, mimicking the numbing loop of incentives that turns curiosity into compliance. You can hear the exhaustion baked into the syntax: by the end, the act itself has been hollowed out, leaving only the measurable outcome.

The intent isn’t simply to dunk on education; it’s to name a specific kind of corrosion. When the reward structure is narrow, students get efficient. They optimize for rubrics, not meaning. Reading becomes scavenger-hunting for testable details; writing becomes a performance of what the evaluator wants to see. The subtext is darker: even someone who will later make a life in literature can be conditioned into disengagement. That’s a warning to anyone still clinging to the idea that “the best students” are the ones most in love with learning.

Context matters here. Salvatore is a massively popular fantasy author, a professional storyteller in a genre that’s often dismissed by gatekeepers even as it builds lifelong readers. That background sharpens the critique: the culture that polices what “counts” as serious reading can accidentally punish the very appetite that fiction thrives on. The quote argues, implicitly, that grades don’t just measure literacy; they can reshape our relationship to it.