Art & Creativity Quote by Morris West

West is admitting to a kind of elegant selfishness that, in a working writer’s life, functions as discipline. The line sounds modest - just follow your curiosity - but the subtext is strategic: he’s rejecting market research, trend-chasing, and the anxious guesswork of trying to please an imagined “audience.” Instead, he bets on a sturdier engine: obsession. If a subject is strong enough to hold his attention through the lonely slog of drafting, revising, and defending choices, it likely has the voltage to hold someone else’s.

The key rhetorical move is the quiet leap from “me” to “a lot of other people.” That leap is not naive; it’s a theory of human overlap. West’s novels often trafficked in institutions and moral pressure points - faith, power, conscience, geopolitics - arenas where private doubt becomes public drama. In that context, his principle isn’t “write what you know” so much as “write what you can’t stop thinking about,” then trust that the obsession taps a shared nerve.

There’s also a professional flex hiding in the plainness. Only a writer with miles on the odometer can say this without sounding like a dilettante. West is defending a certain mid-century authorial authority: the belief that seriousness is legible, that readers can sense when a book is animated by genuine inquiry rather than product positioning. It’s an ethic of craft disguised as a shrug, and that’s why it lands.