Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 60

The artist is a contemporary pariah because everybody understand what he is, and what he is doing, and thinks he should go straight to hell....... Do you think that an artist selects his theme? It is all simple obsession, which is why no professional reviewer will tolerate for a moment a deviation from what he takes letters to be. The artist gets on the maniac nag, rides him into the flames. Goes mad. Rots in obscurity. Destroys his gifts by finally selling them and himself. "Consumes himself in bitterness." Blows his brains out. Or pretends that nothing fazes him and dies over and over in his imagination, doing his best not to smash those close to him. Or writes, like Hemingway, a book of weary, desperate bitterness, Across the River and into the Trees, delightedly assaulted by the corps of hacks, whom he placated, with what staggering cynicism, with his last book, The Old Man and the Sea. And won the Nobel Prize, and lost his mind, and blew his head off. Nothing strange about that.