Life & Wisdom Quote by Leon Uris

Writing gets called a “craft” the way war gets called a “conflict”: technically true, emotionally evasive. Leon Uris’s line lands because it treats authorship less like a talent and more like a job slot in a brutally competitive labor market. “Position” is the key word. It demystifies the romantic idea of the novelist as a chosen vessel and replaces it with something colder: access, leverage, and survival.

The repetition of “very, very” isn’t poetic flourish; it’s a kind of weary emphasis, the cadence of someone who’s watched doors close. Uris came up without pedigree, served in World War II, and built a career on big, researched historical epics that had to satisfy editors, fact-checkers, and mass audiences all at once. He knew that even after you break through, the industry’s memory is short and its appetites change. One hit doesn’t grant tenure; it grants you the chance to try again under brighter lights and harsher expectations.

“Obtain... and retain” sketches the two-stage humiliation of creative work: first you beg to be let in, then you hustle to avoid being replaced. The subtext is also about power. Gatekeepers decide who gets the “position,” but readers decide whether you keep it, and neither group is obligated to care about your effort. Uris isn’t complaining so much as warning: if you want the life, you accept the precarity. The sentence’s ellipsis feels like the pause where the fantasy dies and the work begins.