Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Focus on the joy of writing rather than the pursuit of financial gain.
This quote by Pearl S. Buck emphasizes the intrinsic value of writing as an artistic endeavor, suggesting that writers should prioritize their passion and the satisfaction derived from creating stories over the potential financial rewards. By framing monetary success as an 'unlikely accident', Buck encourages writers to find fulfillment in the act of writing itself, reinforcing the idea that true success lies in personal contentment rather than external validation.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech at a writers' conference, you could emphasize the importance of enjoying the writing process, referencing Buck's quote.
More from Pearl S. Buck
All quotes βYou are free when you gain back yourself,β Madame Wu said. βYou can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
Similar quotes
When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.
I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself.
You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor.
It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.