Can I help it if I like cool quotes about writers?
 
The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition — in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
—James Joyce, Irish novelist and short-story writer, "Why I Write", 1946
 
It doesn't hurt that Joyce was a brilliant writer.