Daily Inspiration Quote by Erich Segal

Segal punctures the most flattering kind of myth: the myth of the well-adjusted person. By putting "equilibrium" in scare quotes, he treats composure as a public-facing concept, not an inner condition. The word itself sounds scientific, even moral, like a steady state you earn through discipline. Then he yanks it back into the realm of performance: what people admire is not serenity but presentation.

The sentence structure does a quiet trick. He concedes the premise people project onto him, then immediately reframes it as their mistake. "Really an illusion" isn’t just modesty; it’s a critique of how easily we outsource our insecurities onto other people’s calm exteriors. The insistence on being "as flawed as anyone" is egalitarian on the surface, but it carries a sharper subtext: society rewards the concealment of mess, not the absence of it.

The final clause is where the cultural diagnosis lands. "It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding" admits to a skill, almost a craft. Hiding becomes a competency, something practiced and perfected. Coming from a novelist, the line also reads like a meta-comment on storytelling itself: narratives depend on what’s withheld, what’s revealed, what’s edited into coherence. Segal is confessing that the composed self is a kind of character we write and revise for others, and that the audience often prefers the polished draft to the honest manuscript.