I can’t earn my own living. I could never make anything turn into money. It’s like making fires. A careful assortment of paper, shavings, faggots and kindling nicely tipped with pitch will never light for me. I have never been present when a cigarette butt, extinct, thrown into a damp and isolated spot, started a conflagration in the California woods.
ATTRIBUTION:
Margaret Anderson (1886–1973), U.S. literary editor and autobiographer. My Thirty Years’ War, ch. 1 (1930).
Anderson founded and edited a charming, influential literary and arts magazine, The Little Review, which never made money.
