“The young novelist sitting beside me began a description of how he had efficiently and effectively planned his first book to be commercially successful, adaptable for movie purposes and generally a money-making machine. The plan worked. He made money. (I quietly began to dislike him.) And then he talked about writing his second novel and the way he’d written that one for his friends. He’d cared about it. At which point he cried. Right out on stage, he wept big authorial tears of sheer bloody happiness. He had accidentally done something which had made him deeply happy – he had written for love. The only thing better than sitting next to that level of joy is having it yourself. Every day.”
–A.L. Kennedy in The Guardian