If you ask someone: 'Can you play the violin?' and he says: 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.
--A.B. Goldenweizer, Talks With Tolstoi (as quoted in The Writer on His Art vi (Walter Allen ed., 1949)).
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