There is nothing more becoming in an author than modesty. Regardless of what egotistic airs they may put on, most writers, I suspect, have a fairly accurate assessment of their own worth and achievement. Still, they — we — are dependent to an uncomfortable extent on the world’s judgment, perhaps hoping that by some fluke the world will rate us higher than we rate ourselves. The problem is not that the world so often ignores literary effort (though that is certainly the case), but that to the degree it breaks its silence it tends to distribute the rewards in a mystifyingly erratic manner.
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