"My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore"
About this Quote
Discipline, not inspiration, is the engine in Kate DiCamillo's writing life, and she refuses to romanticize it. The math is almost aggressively ordinary: two pages a day, five days a week. That modest quota is a quiet rebuke to the myth of the author as lightning rod for genius. It's also a practical trick of self-management: small enough to be non-scary, steady enough to compound into a book.
The line that bites is the confession at the center: "I never want to write". DiCamillo punctures the cultural fantasy that real writers feel perpetually called, aflame, eager. She admits the dread without granting it authority. Then she flips the emotional arc with a second truth: "I'm always glad that I have done it". The subtext is behavioral, almost therapeutic: you can't wait for desire; you build a life where satisfaction follows action, not the other way around.
The final sentence grounds the whole thing in class and routine. After the sacred act of writing comes the unglamorous shift at the bookstore. It's a portrait of an artist not floating above the world but embedded in it, tethered to wages, schedules, and the retail ecosystem that literally shelves her craft. The intent feels both personal and civic: to normalize creative work as work, to make literature less a temple and more a practice, done before the day job, one manageable page at a time.
The line that bites is the confession at the center: "I never want to write". DiCamillo punctures the cultural fantasy that real writers feel perpetually called, aflame, eager. She admits the dread without granting it authority. Then she flips the emotional arc with a second truth: "I'm always glad that I have done it". The subtext is behavioral, almost therapeutic: you can't wait for desire; you build a life where satisfaction follows action, not the other way around.
The final sentence grounds the whole thing in class and routine. After the sacred act of writing comes the unglamorous shift at the bookstore. It's a portrait of an artist not floating above the world but embedded in it, tethered to wages, schedules, and the retail ecosystem that literally shelves her craft. The intent feels both personal and civic: to normalize creative work as work, to make literature less a temple and more a practice, done before the day job, one manageable page at a time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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