Art & Creativity Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Writing is framed here not as a hobby but as a compulsion with consequences. Van Doren grants the obvious first: the work is hard. The pivot - "But it's harder not to" - snaps the complaint shut and replaces it with a diagnosis. Difficulty isn’t the point; inevitability is. For a critic, especially, not-writing isn’t restful silence. It’s a kind of pressure build: thoughts that curdle, judgments that go untested, an inner argument with the world that has nowhere to land. The line works because it reframes suffering. The pain of drafting becomes the lesser ache compared to the irritant of withholding.

The intent feels almost corrective, aimed at people who romanticize the struggle or treat writer's block as a moral verdict. Van Doren suggests the opposite: the real failure is trying to escape the vocation. Subtext: if you are meant to write, you will be miserable either way, so choose the misery that produces something.

Context matters. Van Doren came out of an era when "letters" were a public force, when critics and editors helped arbitrate culture and taste, and when writing was less a personal brand than a civic instrument. The sentence has the clipped practicality of someone who lived by deadlines and judgments, not vibes. It’s also quietly anti-heroic: no talk of genius, inspiration, or muses. Just a blunt metric for identity - you can tell what you are by what becomes unbearable to avoid.