“If security, high grades, reputation, a sure job, doing what is expected, avoiding trouble, or if safety in any way becomes your most effectual desire, then you will accept discipline of the compromise variety. Soon you will cease growing. When you have settled in a job that denies desires you had fondly supposed were strong, you will subside, with a fatal finality, that nothing but a cataclysm is likely to disturb, into compromise maturity. Even then you can become a writer. But not a good one. Your imagination will quietly atrophy.”
From ‘Indirections (for those who want to write) by Sidney Cox.
