War & Peace Quote by Margaret Anderson

Reality is the one opponent you can never finally beat, which is exactly why Margaret Anderson’s brag lands as both confession and dare. As the founding editor of The Little Review, she made a career out of treating the given world - its laws, gatekeepers, and “good taste” - as negotiable. “My greatest enemy is reality” isn’t adolescent escapism; it’s a statement of editorial method. Reality, here, means the consensus version: the sanctioned narratives that tell artists what’s publishable, women what’s permissible, and radicals what’s “reasonable.”

The second sentence does the real work. “I have fought it successfully for thirty years” turns a private temperament into an institutional record. It’s a flex, but also a sly acknowledgment of how exhausting cultural antagonism is: thirty years of picking fights with courts, censors, patrons, and the quieter censorship of respectability. Anderson did, famously, publish Joyce’s Ulysses and helped trigger an obscenity trial. If reality is the state’s authority to define what counts as art, she’s claiming victories in the only arena she controlled: the page.

The subtext is that editing can be a form of warfare waged with typography and stubbornness. “Successfully” doesn’t mean she replaced reality with fantasy; it means she kept open a pocket of unreality where new reality could be rehearsed. The line also needles the idea that adulthood equals surrender. For Anderson, maturity isn’t acceptance. It’s stamina.