Writing Quote by Mary Garden

Mary Garden’s line cuts through the romance-industrial complex that’s grown up around artistic struggle. “Writer’s block” gets treated like a diagnosis: an external force that descends, absolves, and even confers a kind of tortured credibility. Garden punctures that mythology by calling it what it often is in practice: an excuse, deployed “to others and myself.” That second audience matters. The sharper indictment isn’t about fooling the world; it’s about the story you tell privately so you can keep your self-image intact while avoiding the vulnerable, tedious work of producing imperfect pages.

The phrase “as if it was some kind of illness” does two things at once. It mocks the temptation to medicalize ordinary resistance, and it hints at how seductive that framing can be. Illness grants permission. It invites sympathy instead of scrutiny. It relocates agency from the writer’s choices to a condition that “happens” to them. Garden’s subtext is bracing: the block isn’t a mysterious affliction so much as fear, fatigue, perfectionism, or avoidance dressed up in clinical costume.

Contextually, coming from a woman of her era, the statement also reads like a refusal of genteel alibis. Creative legitimacy was policed; so was female ambition. Naming the excuse suggests a hard-won clarity about how easily culture teaches artists - especially women - to seek socially acceptable reasons for not taking up space. The intent isn’t cruelty; it’s liberation: drop the diagnosis, reclaim the pen.