Politics & Power Quote by Elizabeth George

George is slipping a small dare into what looks like reassurance. The line starts by swatting down a familiar panic - that American writing is fading - but the real claim isn’t about book sales or attention spans. It’s about an ecosystem: writing survives when writers behave less like lone geniuses and more like stewards.

The key move is her pivot from “art form” to “published writers.” She’s not romanticizing literature in the abstract; she’s talking about gatekeepers and beneficiaries of the system as it exists. “Accept the wisdom and the necessity” reads like a gentle moral correction. Encouraging new talent isn’t framed as charity or personal kindness; it’s presented as professional responsibility, almost civic duty. The subtext: the industry can be brutal and competitive, but it doesn’t have to be cannibalistic. If the people who’ve made it decide mentoring is optional, the culture thins out fast.

Context matters: George is a contemporary, prolific novelist who built a career in a commercial publishing world that thrives on continuity - series readers, genre communities, writing conferences, MFA programs, workshops. Her optimism is strategic. It reassures anxious readers and aspiring writers while implicitly praising the parts of the literary marketplace that invest in succession.

There’s also a quiet defensiveness here: “in America” suggests she’s responding to a recurring national narrative of decline. Her answer isn’t nostalgia. It’s infrastructure. The art doesn’t die because the ladder, however imperfect, is still being held in place by those who already climbed it.