Jul 9
Writing is hard, but living is harder.
Sometimes a young writer or a writing student tells me how hard they find writing is. Writing is so hard, they say, with a whine or else self-glorification in their voice. That always puts me in a suspicious mood. If you complain about writing being hard—I sometimes want to say to them—then you must have understood very little about life. Writing is hard, but living is harder. Writing is optional. Living, too, is optional, though its demands make writing seem idyllic.
— Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 20 2025)
