Art & Creativity Quote by Elizabeth George

"Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning"

Elizabeth George, Author

About this Quote

Elizabeth George is skewering the minor celebrity fantasy that clings to the book world: the desire for the artifact and the aura, not the labor. Her phrasing is deliberately blunt, almost carpentry-simple. "Want to have written" versus "want to write" is a surgical distinction, exposing how ambition often disguises itself as vocation. The jab lands harder because she doesn’t target beginners, exactly; she targets a cultural script that treats authorship as a brand identity you can purchase through aspiration alone.

The image of the "front cover" name and the "grinning picture" on the back is doing double duty. It’s literal (publishing is a visual marketplace) and satirical (the grin reads as performative, the author as a commodity). George understands that contemporary literary culture invites this confusion: social media rewards announcement over process; publishing mythology spotlights the deal, the launch, the author photo, while the years of drafts stay politely offstage.

Her final line is a moral correction disguised as craft advice. By calling the book and the photo "the end of a job", she re-centers authorship as work, not self-expression as lifestyle. The subtext is also protective: writing is hard enough without the additional disappointment of chasing a hollow trophy. George isn’t romanticizing struggle; she’s insisting on sequence. If you can’t tolerate the unglamorous middle - the solitude, the repetition, the sentences that fail - you’re not being denied a dream. You’re mistaking the receipt for the meal.

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Topic	Writing
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About the Author

Elizabeth George (born February 26, 1949) is a Author from USA.

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