Art & Creativity Quote by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs doesn’t frame publication as a hope or a hustle; he frames it as an inevitability. The line has the clean, almost unsettling confidence of someone describing a decision rather than a dream. That’s the intent: to demystify “making it” by relocating the turning point from talent or luck to will - a private, internal flip of the switch. It’s a writer’s version of manifestation, but stripped of incense and inflated rhetoric. The sentence is blunt because the fantasy it punctures is blunt: that success is mostly bestowed.

The subtext, though, is more complicated than pure swagger. “Once I decided” implies that before the decision, the self was optional, provisional. For a memoirist who built a career turning chaotic personal history into material, that matters. Burroughs is talking about authorship as identity: publication becomes proof that the life you’ve survived can be converted into narrative capital. It’s also a small act of revenge against the gatekeeping machinery of publishing. He doesn’t mention editors, agents, MFA programs, or “the market,” as if refusing to grant them authorial power over his story.

Contextually, the quote lands in a culture that oscillates between romanticizing the “tortured artist” and fetishizing the grind. Burroughs offers a third posture: not suffering, not grinding - committing. It works because it’s both inspirational and faintly alarming. If it’s true, you’re accountable for your ambition. If it’s not, you still admire the audacity required to act as if it is.