Time & Perspective Quote by Donald McKay

Forty-two years is doing a lot of quiet persuasion here: it turns “writer” from an identity anyone can claim into an earned credential, measured in decades, not vibes. McKay’s line is less autobiography than boundary-setting. He’s pushing back against a familiar downgrade, the one that treats writing as ornamental to “real” labor - a pastime you dabble in after the important work is done. By naming it “full time” and then sharpening the contrast (“Not a hobby”), he’s policing the terms of respectability.

The subtext reads like a professional skirmish inside the 19th-century economy of craft. A designer who insists on being recognized as a writer is also insisting that ideas, language, and persuasion are part of production, not a decorative overlay. That matters in a period when design was hardening into an industrial discipline and authorship was being pulled between gentlemanly amateurism and modern professionalism. McKay’s insistence on “serious work” is a claim to wages, status, and legitimacy - a demand that the mental labor of drafting, revising, and articulating carries the same dignity as the physical labor people are quicker to respect.

The phrasing is plain on purpose. No romance of inspiration, no tortured-genius mythology. Just time served and work performed. It’s a proto-modern defense of creative labor: you don’t get to enjoy the output while dismissing the process.