Politics & Power Quote by Ken Kesey

Kesey’s line lands like a shrug that’s also a challenge: in America, “getting better” isn’t just difficult, it’s almost culturally impolite. Pairing himself with Norman Mailer matters. Mailer is the high-testosterone public novelist, Kesey the prankster-mystic of the counterculture; together they represent two brands of American literary ambition, both allergic to modesty. When they agree improvement is hard, it’s not false humility. It’s an indictment of the ecosystem.

The key word is “America,” not “writing.” Kesey is pointing at a national temperament built for rupture, reinvention, and quick myth-making, less for apprenticeship. American culture loves the breakout: the debut, the hustle, the “voice.” It’s suspicious of refinement because refinement implies deference to standards you didn’t invent. “Get better” suggests practice, revision, and being teachable - traits that don’t photograph well and don’t sell the legend of the self-made genius. Even the marketplace pushes writers to repeat what worked, to become a brand rather than a student of the craft.

“Especially at writing” twists the knife. Writing is one of the few arts where the tools are common property: everyone has language, everyone has opinions. That democratization is beautiful and brutal; it creates an ambient noise of certainty that can drown out the slower, lonelier work of becoming good. Kesey’s subtext is almost therapeutic: if improvement feels impossible, it’s not only you. It’s the country’s addiction to arrival over progress.