Success Quote by Richard Price

Price’s line lands like a weary punchline because it shrinks the romantic myth of authorship down to its smallest moving parts: 26 letters, endlessly permuted, as if the whole grand enterprise were a stubborn anagram. The comedy is in the math. We’re trained to think of writing as inspiration, voice, vision; Price reminds you it’s closer to carpentry performed with toothpicks. That reduction isn’t self-pity so much as a hard-earned demystification: the work is less about genius than about tolerance for repetition.

The “three years” matters. It signals the long-haul reality of novels and screenplays, the way a project colonizes your calendar and then your nervous system. Price, a novelist and screenwriter associated with grit-heavy realism, is allergic to the airy talk of the muse. His world is deadlines, rewrites, scenes that won’t land, characters who turn flat when you need them alive. “Rearranging” captures the brutal truth that you’re often not inventing new material so much as endlessly revising the same material toward clarity, rhythm, and emotional accuracy.

Then comes the kicker: “lose your mind day by day.” Not a single breakdown, but an attrition model of madness. It’s the psychological tax of obsessing over micro-choices that allegedly “don’t matter” (a comma, a beat, a synonym) until you realize they’re the only things that matter. The subtext is a kind of solidarity: if writing feels like slow insanity, you’re doing it right, because the job is to care too much about tiny symbols until they start to mean something.