I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.