Necessary Voices

Our Story is One that Deserves to Be Taught, Told, and Preserved : InProgress James Baldwin
 

Work on your writing, not on your career:

There’s a French professor at the University of Toulouse who writes about Latin American literature; many young authors wrote to him telling him not to write so much about me because I didn’t need it anymore and other people did. But what they forget is that when I was their age the critics weren’t writing about me, but rather about Miguel Angel Asturias. The point I’m trying to make is that these young writers are wasting their time writing to critics rather than working on their own writing. It’s much more important to write than to be written about. One thing that I think was very important about my literary career was that until I was forty years old, I never got one cent of author’s royalties, though I’d had five books published.

–from a 1981 interview with The Paris Review

Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  This quote taken from a collection of his thoughts and interviews on writing. Full article is at Literary Hub by Emily Temple