Time & Perspective Quote by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs isn’t selling romance; he’s selling confinement. The line lands like a pep talk, but the subtext is closer to a dare: if you want the identity, pay the toll in hours, solitude, and unglamorous repetition. “The secret” is deliberately anti-mystical, a jab at the cottage industry of writerly aspiration - workshops, reading lists, aesthetic posturing - that can feel productive while quietly replacing the only activity that counts.

The sentence structure does the work. He piles up respectable alternatives (“think,” “study,” “plan”) and then knocks them over with a blunt veto: “not enough.” That’s a cultural critique as much as personal advice. In an era where “being a writer” can mean cultivating a brand, tweeting insights, or performing expertise, Burroughs insists on a less visible credential: pages. The quote rejects the fantasy that proximity to literature equals making literature.

“Lock yourself away” is the phrase with bite. It frames writing as chosen isolation, almost monastic, and it refuses the modern preference for constant connection and soft accountability. There’s also an implied permission slip: you’re allowed to disappear for the work. Coming from Burroughs - whose own career is tied to candid, often messy autobiographical storytelling - it reads as a reminder that the raw material of a life doesn’t self-assemble into narrative. You don’t become a writer by having experiences or opinions; you become one by submitting them to the lonely, stubborn labor of turning thought into sentences.