Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy dismantles the romantic myth of the “gifted” writer with the cool certainty of someone who’s watched ambition collapse under the weight of waiting. “The real writer is one who really writes” is less motivational poster than gatekeeping-as-liberation: it relocates legitimacy from identity to behavior. You don’t become a writer by feeling like one, or by being told you are. You become one by doing the unglamorous thing, repeatedly, when no one is clapping.

Her jab at talent is the sharpest move. Calling it “an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire” turns talent into a bogus scientific explanation retrofitted onto a visible result. We see a book; we concoct “talent” to make the labor disappear. Piercy’s point isn’t that ability doesn’t exist, but that “talent” is a story culture tells to preserve hierarchy: it flatters the successful and lets the rest off the hook.

“Work is its own cure” lands with a writer’s intimate knowledge of dread: the cure for blockage, self-doubt, and longing is not insight but motion. The final line delivers the real cost. “You have to like it better than being loved” names the rivalry between art and approval. Writing demands a private allegiance strong enough to outlast praise, indifference, even misunderstanding. In Piercy’s broader feminist and labor-conscious context, this reads as a refusal of performative likability: choose the work, even when it makes you less easy to adore.