"Now, that's something I can't understand about America. It's a big generous country, but so many students of mine seemed to think they couldn't let anyone else support them. A student of mine had this thing about you mustn't live on your father and I argued with him. I explained that a European writer would live on anybody, would live on a prostitute if he had to, it didn't matter; the great thing was to get the job done. But he didn't believe in this, so he rang up his father and told him he'd had a story refused by The New Yorker, and his father said, 'I can keep you for the next forty years, don't you think you can get a story in The New Yorker in forty years?' Well, this father was a man I understood and sympathized with, a decent man. But the boy felt he mustn't be supported by his father, so he came down to New York and started selling office furniture."
I got a check today from a client, a wonderful fellow who's retired and writes short stories about men who love women, who are entranced and manipulated by their feminine wiles, often times to the point of their own self-detriment. The check was for $60. It's not much, but it beats selling office furniture. As far as I'm concerned, anything, even being broke all the time, is better than geting sucked back into "making a living" but feeling used up and creatively dry.
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