Aging & Wisdom Quote by Raymond E. Feist

Feist is pushing back on the flattering myth that time automatically upgrades talent. Aging, he suggests, is only useful if it produces creative evolution; otherwise you just become a period piece with a longer publication history. The sting in "old young writer" lands because it names a familiar failure mode in the arts: repeating the same voice, the same preoccupations, the same bag of tricks, only with more nostalgia and fewer risks. It is not about being young or old. It is about being stuck.

The line works because it frames growth as an ethical obligation, not a career milestone. "One likes to think" signals self-skepticism: the comforting story we tell ourselves is that experience equals depth, but Feist is wary of that self-mythologizing. The implied challenge is to keep interrogating your own habits, to avoid turning craft into a well-worn routine that readers can predict by page three.

Then he widens the lens: "the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell". For a fantasy writer with decades of world-building, this is quietly meta. The "universe" is both the real-world cultural moment (publishing trends, reader appetites, politics) and the invented cosmos he’s spent a career extending. Subtext: longevity in genre fiction isn’t just about maintaining a franchise; it’s about recalibrating what your imagination finds urgent. Choice is the key word. Feist claims agency over relevance, insisting that staying alive on the page means noticing change, then answering it with different stories rather than louder versions of the old ones.