It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
Interpretation
It's important to accept that you can't satisfy everyone and recognize that it's okay not to try.
This quote emphasizes the wisdom in understanding that trying to please everyone can lead to dissatisfaction and compromise one's own voice or authenticity. It encourages writers and individuals alike to focus on their true audience and values rather than seeking universal approval.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I used this quote to encourage fellow writers to embrace their unique voices.
Life isn't happily ever after... It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.
Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.
The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.
No one can be great, or good, or happy except through the inward efforts of themselves.
More knowledge may be gained of a man's real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
I don't see the point of doing an interview unless you're going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I'm extremely human and have done some dark things I don't think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I'd like to think it's the nice thing to do.
To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.
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