To stay a writer (Zambreno)

Kafka's insurance firm was full of aspiring poets, a reminder that it is fairly commonplace to want to be a writer or poet.  It is more unusual to stay a writer despite lack of status or outward success, to sacrifice sanity, sleep, positive well-being, health, to instead dwell in a life that is one of almost constant paranoia, oscillating between horror at invisibility and nausea at visibility.

Kate Zambreno, from To Write As If Already Dead